Hackers gained access to the Twitter accounts of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and many others Wednesday afternoon in an apparent cryptocurrency giveaway scam. Other accounts including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Apple, Uber, and Square’s CashApp were also hacked.
Update, 2:45 p.m. PT: Here’s the first statement from Twitter:
https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1283518038445223936
Update, 9:25 p.m. PT: Twitter provided more details about the “coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.”
https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1283591848729219073
And here’s a message from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey:
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1283571658339397632
Original story: The tweet below was posted from Gates’ account at 1:34 p.m. PT, but was then deleted. The same tweet from Gates appeared at 1:48 p.m. PT.
“We can confirm that this tweet was not sent by Bill Gates,” a spokesperson for Bill Gates told GeekWire. “This appears to be part of a larger issue that Twitter is facing. Twitter is aware and working to restore the account.”
A tweet from Musk was sent out just before 1:30 p.m. PT and was also deleted, before another appeared at 1:50 p.m. PT. Update: Another similar tweet appeared at 2:19 p.m. PT.
https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/1283500081732358144
Biden, Obama, and Bezos were also hacked:
Here are the tweets from Apple and Uber’s accounts:
Uber responded with this:
https://twitter.com/Uber_Comms/status/1283510688288083969
More than $100,000 had been funneled to the bitcoin address included in the tweets.
Even those with two-factor authentication reported having their accounts compromised.
Twitter stock was down more than 3% in after-hours trading.
The Verge noted that Musk has been targeted by bitcoin scammers in the past.
Update, 3:18 p.m. PT: Twitter appeared to disable verified accounts as part of its response to the hacking.
https://twitter.com/itwasntandy/status/1283524229317656577
https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1283526400146837511
Here is more commentary from others:
https://twitter.com/CoinDesk/status/1283498759226261505
https://twitter.com/winklevoss/status/1283493640287989760
https://twitter.com/meharris/status/1283504087355408384
https://twitter.com/ampressman/status/1283510560244596736
https://twitter.com/lawmaster/status/1283496704277467136