MAJOR companies and verified accounts had their Twitter profiles hacked on July 15.
Several news sources report this was the most “widespread and confounding” hack Twitter has ever seen. During the hack, the unidentified hackers promoted a bitcoin scam that earned them a lot of money. Business Insider reports the hackers made over $120,000 worth of bitcoin, but it’s still not exactly clear how much. The hackers sent out Tweets and messages promising bitcoin payments. Most of the Tweets sent out said that the celebrity or high profile person would be “giving back to their community” and that all bitcoin sent to a particular address would be sent back doubled.
Kanye west, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Elon Musk Twitter accounts got hacked and this guys have made over 10M dollars
This will go down as the biggest heist on Twitter pic.twitter.com/q7mUXYzpt0
— Ploque🦍 (@_oluwatobiiiii) July 15, 2020
Celebrities and big names like Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Apple, former President Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg had their accounts hacked. Twitter reportedly confirmed they “took necessary steps to block new tweets from every verified user, compromised or no, as well as locking all compromised accounts.” So if you weren’t able to send Tweets yesterday (July 15) around 5 in the afternoon, this is most likely the reason. Twitter had to disable a wide range of their service for a couple of hours to prevent the scam from spreading more.
Twitter said in a statement that the company detected what they believed to be “a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.”
Most accounts should be able to Tweet again. As we continue working on a fix, this functionality may come and go. We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.
— Support (@Support) July 16, 2020
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.
— Support (@Support) July 16, 2020
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said yesterday was a tough day!
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