Hackers on Wednesday hacked a number of high profile verified Twitter account to spread crypto scam. This high profile hacking includes names like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and others. Hackers twitted from these compromised accounts that any payments made to the address would be doubled and sent back.
Twitter delete these tweets minutes after. Twitter then decided to block verified accounts from any twitting until they find out the root cause of this hack. There were reports that password reset requests were also being denied.
The Biden campaign said Twitter had “locked down the account within a few minutes of the breach and removed the related tweet”. A spokesperson for Gates tells Recode’s Teddy Schleifer, “We can confirm that this tweet was not sent by Bill Gates. This appears to be part of a larger issue that Twitter is facing. Twitter is aware and working to restore the account.”
How the hacker got access to all of these accounts is still unknown. But the fact that so many different users have been compromised at the same time implies that this is a problem with Twitter’s platform itself.
Public blockchain record suggests that the main address used for the hack already received 12.86 bitcoins worth of $118,415.
As of now, said that most of the accounts should be able to tweet now. They are monitoring the situation and working to get things back online as soon as possible. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wrote, “Tough day for us at Twitter. 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.”