On Wednesday, July 15, Twitter experienced a significant security breach when a hacker gained control of accounts belonging to prominent individuals and instructed followers to transfer cryptocurrency, promising to double the amount, leading many to fall for the scam.
The affected accounts included those of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Apple, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Michael Bloomberg, Uber, and several cryptocurrency exchanges and organizations.
The compromised accounts posted tweets promoting a classic bitcoin doubling scam, urging followers to transfer cryptocurrency to a specified bitcoin wallet with the promise of doubling the funds.
Twitter confirmed the breach on Wednesday evening, attributing it to a “coordinated social engineering attack” on its employees that enabled the hackers to access internal systems and tools.
Twitter also stated that it was investigating potential further malicious activities and information access conducted by the hackers, besides the compromised tweets.
The hack unfolded over several hours, prompting Twitter to halt all verified accounts from tweeting. While most accounts were restored on Wednesday evening, Twitter warned of potential additional actions it might take.
The company also locked the compromised accounts and implemented measures to limit access to internal systems and tools during its ongoing investigation.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey expressed regret over the incident, tweeting, “Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.”
Cyber-security expert Dmitri Alperovitch stated to Reuters, “This appears to be the worst hack of a major social media platform yet.”
According to a security source, the website address, cryptoforhealth.com, featured in some hacked tweets, was registered by a cyber-attacker using the email address [email protected] The website registration under the name “Anthony Elias” is suspected to be fake.
The username “Cryptoforhealth” on Instagram, created during the hack, posted a message claiming a charitable intent behind the attack.
The real identities of the hackers remain unknown.
Several Twitter reactions to the hack are displayed below.
