The Twitter accounts of high profile celebrities in the United States including former President Barack Obama and the presidential candidate Joe Biden were hacked by scammers asking people to send cryptocurrency bitcoin.
Other celebrities included Tesla Chief Elon Musk, the co-founder of Microsoft Bill Gates, and others. The Chief Executive Officer of Twitter Jack Dorsey took to Twitter to confirm and said that it has been a tough day for the corporation. He wrote,
“We all feel terrible this happened. We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.”
Twitter said that it was aware of the security incident and announced that it is taking steps to fix it. However, it didn’t provide more information. The hack went on for several hours and the company disabled those accounts to tweet. The company disabled the ability to tweet for the validated accounts and put out a statement saying,
“You may be unable to tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident.”
Biggest Bitcoin Scam
The posts which appeared in multiple accounts promised people that they had 30 minutes to send 1000 dollars in bitcoin for which they would be sent back twice the amount. While the company deleted tweets, there were tweets that were re-posted.
According to blockchain.com that monitors cryptocurrencies transactions, there were over 12.58 bitcoins that are worth over 1,00,000 dollars that were sent to the email address mentioned in the fraudulent posts.
Other celebrities who were a victim to the hack were rapper Kanye West, television show star Kim Kardashian, Businessman Michael Bloomberg, etc. According to Dmitri Alperovitch, the co*founder of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike,
“This appears to be the worst hack of a major social media platform yet.”
The motives and source of the attack are still unknown but there are reports that suggest that the hackers might have gained access at the system level than through individual accounts. Experts have been surprised at the sheer scale of the coordination of the incident.
Source: Scroll.in
