A number of high-profile Twitter accounts were simultaneously hacked on Wednesday by attackers who used the accounts, some with millions of followers, to spread a cryptocurrency scam, TechCrunch reported.
Apple, Elon Musk and Joe Biden were among the accounts compromised in a broadly targeted hack that remained mysterious hours after taking place. Those accounts and many others posted a message promoting the address of a bitcoin wallet with the claim that the amount of any payments made to the address would be doubled and sent back — a known cryptocurrency scam technique.
In the hours following the initial scam posts, Kim Kardashian West, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Wiz Khalifa, Warren Buffett, YouTuber MrBeast, Wendy’s, Uber, CashApp and Mike Bloomberg also posted the cryptocurrency scam.
On Wednesday evening, the company tweeted that “a coordinated social engineering attack” on employees gave a hacker “access to internal systems and tools.”
Before the scope of the incident became clear, the hack appeared to focus on cryptocurrency-focused accounts. In an initial wave of scam posts, @bitcoin, @ripple, @coindesk, @coinbase and @binance were hacked with the same message: “We have partnered with CryptoForHealth and are giving back 5000 BTC to the community,” followed by a link to a website.
The linked site was quickly pulled offline. Kristaps Ronka, chief executive of Namesilo, the domain registrar used by the scammers, told TechCrunch that the company suspended the domain “on the first report” it received. Hacked accounts shifted to sharing multiple bitcoin wallet addresses as the incident went on, making things more difficult to track.
At first, it appeared that some of the compromised accounts were back under their owners’ control as tweets were quickly deleted. But then, Elon Musk’s account tweeted “hi” after his initial tweet with the scam was deleted. The “hi” tweet also disappeared.
Some Democratic political figures were also hacked as part of the cryptocurrency scam, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Mike Bloomberg. An official from the Biden campaign told TechCrunch that Twitter locked down the former vice president’s account “immediately” after it was compromised and the campaign remains in close contact with Twitter on the issue. At the time of writing, no accounts belonging to Republican politicians appear to have been hacked.
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