High-profile Twitter accounts hacked in cryptocurrency scam

In excess of twelve prominent Twitter accounts were hacked on Wednesday, including Billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Joe Biden, and showed tweets telling followers to send bitcoin to a specific address.

Elon Musk was the principal prominent account to be hacked, posting a tweet early Wednesday afternoon promising to twofold any payment sent to the bitcoin address.

“Everybody is asking me to give back,” a tweet from Mr. Gates’ account said. “You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000.”

Twitter said it was a “coordinated” assault focusing on its workers “with access to internal systems and tools”.

“We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools,” the company tweeted from a support account.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that the organization feels terrible about the hacked accounts.

It added that “significant steps” were taken to limit access to such internal systems and tools while the company’s investigation was continuous.

Other accounts hacked included Michael Bloomberg former New York City Mayor, musicians Kanye West and Wiz Khalifa, Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett, reality TV star Kim Kardashian, the Cash App corporate account, and Uber’s corporate account.

All hacked accounts on Wednesday were verified. By 20:30 EDT (00:30 GMT Thursday) users with verified accounts started to be able to send tweets again, but Twitter said it was still working on a fix.