Breaking News: Bill Gates, Musk and Other High Profile Twitter Accounts Hacked

High profile Twitter accounts were hacked in Bitcoin Scam

The most popular microblogging and social networking platform Twitter suffered a major security breach which got hacked of major public figures to take control of the accounts. Report says that the hackers hacked the top voice’s accounts including U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden, Television show star Kim Kardashian, Former U.S. President Barack Obama, billionaire Elon Musk, and rapper Kanye West, and many others.

 

The company got to know about the breach on Wednesday evening and hack attributed it to a “social engineering attack” on its own employees that enabled the hacker to get access “internal system and tools”.

 

The hackers requested the donation in the cryptocurrency by using the verified accounts. From Bill Gates account hackers posted  “You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000.” and the same content in many verified accounts. The hackers published the content by claiming that they will send back your money with a double amount.

 

It was not clear that all verified accounts were affected, if unfortunately they were, then it will create a huge impact on the platforms and even for the users. In case if you don’t know what is verified users, the users include celebrities, journalists, and news agencies as well as governments, politicians, heads of state, and emergency services.

 

Twitter took the extraordinary step by seeing a sign of the seriousness of the problem. It made the prevention of at least some verified accounts by posting the message altogether. Twitter said “looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed”. Twitter didn’t make any clarification till but also said in a statement  that users “may be unable to tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident.”

 

Twitter should take an emergency step to it. Twitter has to take extraordinary step to stop all the verified account who have blue ticks on their account name. They have denied password resetting request and also some other account functions.

 

Dmitri Alperovitch, who co-founded cybersecurity company CrowdStrike said “This appears to be the worst hack of a major social media platform yet.”

 

On the official account of verified users like Elon Musk, Joe Biden and Bill Gates appeared to offer to double any bitcoin payment which will be sent to BTC address of their digital wallet and the content claimed that the offer was for the next 30 minutes. The account users that were affected have millions of followers. But as the first tweet from Musk’s account was removed, another one got appeared, and then third.

 

People who are targeted in this case:

• Kanye West (Rapper) 
• Kim Kardashian (Kanye’s wife and reality TV star)
• Barack Obama (Former U.S. President)
• Elon Musk (Tesla and SpaceX chief)
• Joe Biden (Former US Vice-President, current Democratic presidential candidate)
• Mike Bloomberg (Media billionaire)
• Uber (Ride-sharing app)
• Apple (iPhone maker)

 

Joe Biden said, “Twitter had locked down the account within a few minutes of the breach and removed the related tweet”.

 

This “double your bitcoin” scams on twitter is unprecedented with the actual accounts of verified users hijacked and on a large scale. The fact that so many users have been compromised at the same time implies that this is the problem with Twitter itself.