Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Apple, Bill Gates & Other Major Twitter Accounts Hacked In Bitcoin Scam

By Ammar Haziq  •  16 Jul 2020 in News

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Official accounts of major companies and figures such as Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Apple, Uber, Elon Musk and more were compromised in one of the most widespread hacks on Twitter, all for a Bitcoin scam.

Among other public figures whose accounts were hacked are Kanye West, Michael Bloomberg, Joe Biden, Floyd Mayweather, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet and Wiz Khalifa.

The chaos started when Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Twitter account was seen compromised in a Bitcoin scam. It followed with Bill Gates tweeting something similar.

Although the scammers appear to be using different bitcoin wallets, the address being used on Musk and Gates tweets were the same and have received around USD59,000 worth of bitcoin, according to Gizmodo.

Then, other verified accounts of prominent figures started tweeting about the “donation” with the same bitcoin wallet address, seemingly compromised by the same hackers.

Twitter released a series of tweets updating the situation and how their team is handling it. It has said that this was a coordinated attack by people who have targeted some of their employees who have access to the company’s internal 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.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020

“We know [the hackers] used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf,” the company tweeted.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also shared his thoughts on the hackfest, saying, “Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.”

Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.

We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.

💙 to our teammates working hard to make this right.

— jack (@jack) July 16, 2020

Apart from confirming that employees’ tools were used to hack the accounts, there’s still no answer as to how the scammers got them.

Earlier, Twitter took action by blocking new tweets from every verified user whether they were compromised or not, and locking all compromised accounts until they figured out what was happening.

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 Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020

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