Apple, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Obama & Kanye Get Hacked On Twitter
Images via Frederic Legrand - COMEO / Shutterstock.com, Kathy Hutchins / Shutterstock.com, Everett Collection / Shutterstock.com and lev radin / Shutterstock.com
Twitter suffered its greatest security breach in all of its 14 years on Wednesday, as malicious parties took over the accounts of high-profile figures, including three of the richest people in the world.
The hack shocked the internet, as even the most reputed brains in tech weren’t spared from it. Besides the Twitter accounts of former US president Barack Obama, presidential hopeful Joe Biden, business mogul Warren Buffett, and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the accounts of tech industry leaders Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos were somehow hijacked and dragged into a Bitcoin scam.
Masked as the celebrities, the hackers attempted to coax millions of followers into sending Bitcoin to a specified address, promising to reward them with double the amount in return.
Other victims whose profiles were exploited by the cyber attackers included rapper Kanye West, as well as tech giants Apple and Uber.
While most people would not have fallen for the scams, it’s worth noting that the hacked accounts were of influential figures with many followers. A look at the hackers’ Bitcoin wallet by Brian Krebs of Krebs on Security revealed that 383 transactions had been processed in the 24 hours since the tweets went out. Almost 13 Bitcoin were transferred to the account, amounting to an estimated US$118,500 at the time this article was published.
After an investigation, Twitter responded that the breach was “a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.” Whether its workers were targets or if someone from the company had allowed the malicious parties internal access is still unclear.
Twitter also said it has taken “significant steps” to block entries into internal systems and tools as investigations continue.
On a wider scale, it has temporarily restricted all attempts to tweet Bitcoin wallet addresses.
Addressing the phishing attack, CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted, “Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.”
If there’s one lesson to learn from the affected celebrities in this high-profile attack, it’s to always opt for two-factor authorization whenever possible.
Kanye west, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Elon Musk Twitter accounts got hacked and this guys have made over 10M dollars
— ploque🔥 (@_oluwatobiiiii) July 15, 2020
This will go down as the biggest heist on Twitter pic.twitter.com/q7mUXYzpt0
BREAKING - Joe Biden's account has just been #hacked pic.twitter.com/8GE2ijJzq3
— Disclose.tv 🚨 (@disclosetv) July 15, 2020
Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, Uber, Apple and other high profile accounts were hacked by Bitcoin scammers. pic.twitter.com/9WAtTjFJMj
— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) July 15, 2020
$104,000 has been received at the BTC address involved in the Twitter hack so far. More than 250 transactions so far
— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) July 15, 2020
We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020
Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.
— jack (@jack) July 16, 2020
We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.
💙 to our teammates working hard to make this right.
[via BBC, cover image via Frederic Legrand - COMEO / Shutterstock.com, Kathy Hutchins / Shutterstock.com, Everett Collection / Shutterstock.com and lev radin / Shutterstock.com]
