You may have saved some bitcoins, as there was a high profile Twitter hack happened in the early morning hours (somewhat around 1 AM mid-night IST timing). Top voices in the social platform including that of Elon Musk, former US President Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Kim Kardashian and others, were hijacked. That’s no it, these breached high profile Twitter accounts started tweeting bogus offers to give back double whatever Bitcoins deposit you put it.
Most of these tweets seem to be of the same character – that’s double any given Bitcoin deposit, followed by a BTC address. The worse part, some followers of this high profile Twitter account fell for this trap and send bitcoins to the hackers BTC account.
At the time of writing the BTC address/account has logged over 374 transactions with a net gain of over $1,17,925 (around INR 88.75 lakhs).
Twitter officials were quick to acknowledge the breach and put a temporary lock on these accounts from publishing new tweets, and password resets. According to them, the hackers or malicious actors were able to take advantage of some Twitter employees with access to Twitter’s internal systems and tools.
“We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf. We are looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed and will share more here as we have it,” the company said.
The social media company has gone to an extent that, it locked most of the high profile Twitter verified accounts that were compromised. They deleted all the tweets from the attacker and is now working on securing and re-authenticating these affected Twitter accounts. Internally, the company has now limited, access to those internal systems and tool.
It seems around 17 high profile Twitter verified accounts were compromised. These include billionaire Elon Musk, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, rapper Kanye West, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, investor Warren Buffett, Mike Bloomberg, Wiz Khalifa, politician Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Floyd Mayweather and others. Also, a few corporate accounts were compromised – Apple, Uber and Wendy’s.