The Twitter accounts of several of the world’s most famous people and companies appear to have been hacked in a major security breach.
Tweets published on the Twitter accounts of Apple, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos and many others appear to be pushing a Bitcoin scam.
“We give back to our community. We Bitcoin and we think you deserve it too,” says one of the messages on Apple’s account.
“All Bitcoins sent to our front will be returned duplicates,” he adds, before posting a link.
Many tweets are reposted after being deleted.
Tweets are deleted a few minutes after they appear, however, they scan the blue brand accounts, raising massive questions about Twitter’s security.
Former U.S. President Barack Obama has been among the victims of the attack, as you can see from the tweet cached by Google. This one is particularly pernicious, attempting to persuade people to click to raise funds for a Covid-19 fund.
The account of famous financier Warren Buffett also published the same scam tweet:
The highly coordinated attack also affected the Twitter accounts of cryptocurrency companies, giving credibility to tweets.
The Bitcoin addresses used to increase the budget seem to settle for a lot of transactions, suggesting that the scam has succeeded, scammers would possibly generate fake transactions for donations to be genuine.
Some security experts expressed their astonishment that Twitter disconnected its service until the scenario could be corrected.
The extent of the breach suggests that individual accounts were not compromised, but that a hacker had access to Twitter’s formula or authorization accounts, allowing them to post tweets about the accounts of Americans and featured companies.
A message on the official Twitter account reads: “We are aware of a security incident affecting Twitter accounts. We are reading and taking steps to fix it. We’ll inform everyone shortly.”
Twitter also said that verified and flagged blue accounts might not tweet until the factor has been resolved.
I’ve been a generation and editor for over 20 years. I was deputy editor of the generation segment of the Sunday Times, editor-in-chief of PC Pro mag and
I’ve been a generation and editor for over 20 years. I’ve been deputy editor of the Sunday Times generation segment, editor-in-chief of PC Pro magazine, and have written for more than a dozen other publications and Internet sites over the years. I have also given the impression of being a specialist in the generation of radio and television, adding BBC Newsnight, Chris Evans Show and ITN News at Ten.
Hit me if you have a story of a generation that you want to publish on [email protected].