4 years ago
The twitter accounts of dozens of high-profile were hacked on Wednesday. Most prominent US figures & companies became pawns Wednesday in one of the most evident cyber scams in the internet’s history.
Counting President Barack Obama, Democratic candidate Joe Biden, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg and Apple, Twitter has confirmed that the accounts were hacked in an unprecedented Twitter attack. These kinds of scams are outdated on Twitter, but never have so many prominent accounts been taken over at once.
The accounts with tens of millions of followers (including verified) sent a series of tweets including the address of a bitcoin wallet whose balance grew rapidly to more than $1,00,000 as the scam spread.
Proposing a classic bitcoin scam, the followers were told that if they pass on crypto currency to a specific bitcoin wallet, they would have double the money in return.
“Everyone is asking me to give back,” a tweet from Mr. Gate’s account said. “You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000.”
Alike tweets with similar messages were frequently deleted and re-posted by the verified account, rapper Kanye West and investor Warren Buffett & corporations including Apple over the course of Wednesday afternoon.
Twitter took the drastic step to completely disable the new tweets from verified accounts and also noted that password resets may be disabled while Twitter works to correct the situation.
Late in the Wednesday evening, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted saying that, “Tough day for us at Twitter. We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.”
