According to the announcement, the world’s most high profile Twitter accounts have been hacked to promote fake bitcoin giveaways. It was reported that Bill Gates and Elon Musk Twitter accounts were appeared to be hacked, along with Joe Biden, George Wallace, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Wiz Khalifa, Warren Buffett, Mike Bloomberg, and Jeff Bezos for a crypto-related scam.
They were the targets of a widespread hack to offer fake bitcoin deals with a message promising that if users send BTC to a particular address, they will receive double the amount in return. The tweets were posted on behalf of Bill Gates and Elon Musk, promising people to pay the double.
Billionaires and Corporate Accounts Targeted in Twitter’s Hack
As the twitter accounts of Elon Musk and Bill Gates were taken over, the hacker mentioned a Bitcoin wallet address and promised to send back double the amount of BTC once a user sends a specific amount to the designated wallet first. The Musk’s Twitter account stated, “I am doubling all payments sent to my BTC address for the next 30 minutes. You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000. Tell your family & friends! Only going on for 30 minutes.”
The tweet also included a bitcoin address, probably one associated with the hacker’s crypto wallet. Shortly after the initial wave of tweets from Bill Gates and Musk’s accounts, Apple, Uber’s accounts were also compromised and began promoting the scam, instructing people to send cryptocurrency to the same BTC address. Those tweets have since been deleted.
Uber’s corporate account posted a tweet saying, “Due to Covid-19, we are giving back over $10,000,000 in Bitcoin! All payments sent to our address below will be sent back doubled.” Square’s Cash App account was also compromised. However, it is not clear whether the hacker is the same as the tweet contained a different cryptocurrency address than the ones posted to the other accounts.
Several financial services and crypto-exchange accounts, such as Cash App, Ripple, including Binance, and Coinbase, were also the victims of the latest attack.
Twitter’ s Take on Recent Hacking
Soon, after all, this, Sen. Josh Hawley wrote a letter to Twitter’s Dorsey, calling on the company to take urgent steps to secure the service and to reach out to the FBI and Department of Justice. On 15th evening, Twitter said it had disabled some features, including tweeting, for some accounts while it investigated. Twitter support team mentioned that,”We have locked accounts that were compromised and will restore access to the original account owner only when we are certain we can do so securely.”
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey mentioned that “Tough day for us at Twitter.”
He continued saying that the team feels terrible for all that happened. They are diagnosing and will share everything once they have a complete understanding of exactly what happened.
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