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Major Hack: Bitcoin Scammers Crack Into Twitter’s High Profile Accounts Including Barack Obama, Elon Musk and Bill Gates

July 16, 2020July 16, 2020 The Ancient Times 0 Comments

Report By: Nandika Chand

Microblogging site, Twitter was rocked by a massive bitcoin scam which targeted the accounts of Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Joe Biden amongst other high profile people.

The hackers tricked about a hundred people into transferring cryptocurrency. A typical tweet was sent from Bill Gates account, promising to double all payments sent to his Bitcoin address for the next 30 minutes. “Everyone is asking me to give back and now is the time,” the tweet said. “You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000.” Similar tweets appeared on the accounts of Kanye West, Warren Buffett, Apple, Wendy’s and Uber.

In an official statement, Twitter said the hack was a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some some employees with access to internal systems and tools. “We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible accounts and Tweet on their behalf,” it said. “Internally, we have taken significant steps to limit access to internal systems and tools while our investigation is ongoing.”

Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO, described the hack as a tough day. “We feel terrible this happened. We are diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of what exactly happened,” he said.

The CEO of SocialProof Security, Rachel Tobac said the attack was likely the largest Twitter had ever seen.

The Ancient Times

Because we’re journalists, we’re impatient. We want to gather the news as quickly as possible, using any technological resource available. And when we’re as sure of the story as we can be, we want to share it immediately, in whatever way reaches the most people. The Internet didn’t plant these ideas in our heads. We’ve always been this way.