Twitter account of famous personalities like Billionaires Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk have reportedly been hacked in a bitcoin scam. Accounts of celebrities including star rapper Kanye West, reality TV celebrity Kim Kardashian, former US President Barack Obama, former Vice-President Joe Biden, ride-sharing company Uber’s official account, media billionaire Mike Bloomberg, and tech giant Apple have also been hacked.
According to reports, some tweets were sent by hackers on these accounts. One tweet from Bill Gates’ Twitter account stated to give back $2000 to anyone sending $1000 to his account. Likewise, the official account of Elon Musk was used to tweet a message claiming to double any Bitcoin payment sent to his digital wallet in the next 30 minutes. The tweet also stated that Tesla Chief was feeling generous due to coronavirus along with a Bitcoin link.
While speaking on the same, Twitter stated that the attack was planned that aimed its employees having access to internal tools and systems. The company is aware that the hackers used the access to control several highly visible as well as verified accounts and further tweets from them.
The company added that certain steps were taken to stop access to these internal tools and systems and the platform’s investigation was already ongoing.
Twitter has previously taken some extraordinary steps and stopped several verified accounts from tweeting. The company also denied few passwords reset requests while few account functions were disabled.
Users having verified accounts were able to post tweets again by 20:30 EDT but the platform said it was still working to get a fix. Dmitri Alperovitch, Co-Founder of CrowdStrike, stated that it appeared to be the worst hack ever of any social media platform that happened till date.
Source credit: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53425822