Major US Twitter accounts hacked in Bitcoin scam

Billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Bill Gates are among the many US figures who are targeted by hackers on Twitter in an apparent Bitcoin scam.

The official accounts of prominent figures were hacked and requested donations in the cryptocurrency. The US Senate Commerce committee has asked Twitter to brief it about the incident next week.

So far Twitter has reported in a series of tweets that  it was a “coordinated” attack targeting its employees “with access to internal systems and tools”.

Hackers used this access to take control of many highly-visible accounts and Tweet on their behalf. It is added that significant steps had been taken to limit access of criminals to such internal systems. For the time being Twitter has blocked users from being able to tweet Botcoin wallet addresses. 

Meanwhile, Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey tweeted about the incident: 

“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

Moreover, People are urged to treat requests for money or sensitive information on social media with extreme caution. Cyber-security experts said that the breach could have been a lot worse in other circumstances.