On Wednesday, July 15, 2020, unidentified hackers broke into the Twitter accounts of technology moguls, politicians, celebrities and major companies in an apparent Bitcoin scam.
High-profile Twitter accounts including Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Kim Kardashian, Uber, Apple and others were hacked in an internal breach that lasted for four hours and is believed to be one of the largest social media attacks ever.
The intruders, posing as theses famous individuals, posted similar tweets, all instructing people to send cryptocurrency to the same anonymous bitcoin address with the promise they’d get double the amount back from them.
Official Twitter handles of major cryptocurrency accounts like Gemini, Coinbase, Binance and Cash App were also targeted in the aggressive and unprecedented cyber attack.
ALL MAJOR CRYPTO TWITTER ACCOUNTS HAVE BEEN COMPROMISED.
2FA / strong password was used for @Gemini account. We are investigating and hope to have more information shortly. https://t.co/X3C0uJzc6C
— Cameron Winklevoss (@cameron) July 15, 2020
Around 300 people were reported to have been duped by the tweets, sending $1118,000 to the hackers before Twitter intervened by taking down the tweets and then locking all verified accounts to stop the breach spreading further, with users temporarily losing their ability to tweet.
It's an actual wallet address and there are transactions happening. It's unclear if these transactions are legit. Scammers often seed their own scams to give them the appearance of authenticity. https://t.co/GUHEDaKNxu pic.twitter.com/xfhl3817xr
— Ryan Mac 🙃 (@RMac18) July 15, 2020
The social media company released a statement saying they’re aware of the “security incident” and are working to fix it.
We are aware of a security incident impacting accounts on Twitter. We are investigating and taking steps to fix it. We will update everyone shortly.
— Support (@Support) July 15, 2020
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also said he felt ‘terrible’ following the massive security breach.
Photo Credit: Google
