Crypto scam: The Twitter accounts of Bill Gates, Joe Biden, and many others got hacked
Yesterday Wednesday the 15th of July 2020, a Crypto hack targeting the accounts of some high-profile Twitter accounts was noticed. The Twitter accounts of people like Bill Gates, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, and some companies like Apple got hacked.
Twitter is one of the most used social media platforms by influential personalities, big companies and organisations. And some of the high-profile Twitter accounts belong to personalities like Bill Gates, Joe Bidens and companies like Apple.
The targeted accounts hacked all dispalyed a message that seemed to promote crypto currency scam.
Also, the accounts of Kanye West, Kim Kardashian West, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos and Mike Bloomberg, posted similar tweets soliciting donations via Bitcoin to their verified profiles in return for a double the amount sent.
How it all began
From the start, the hacking appeared to only target Crypto-currency-based Twitter accouts like of scam posts, @bitcoin, @ripple, @coindesk, etc.
According to Techcrunch, the hacker posted this message on the Twitter profiles of the cryptocurrency-related accounts;
Crypto scam message
“We have partnered with CryptoForHealth and are giving back 5000 BTC to the community,”
And after many complaints from some Twitter users, it was then confirmed the hack was targeting also high-profile Twitter accounts. And amongst these accounts, Apple wasn’t lagging behind, as their account too was compromised and a scam message posted.
And all the scam messages which seemed to promote Bitcoin figured the same bitcoin address which was found to have received more than $100,000 worth of Bitcoins through hundreds of transactions.
Twitters reaction to this Crypto hack
At first, Twitter considered the issue to be a security flaw, only to understand that many Twitter accounts were been compromised and had a similar message posted.
So, in order to fix things, Twitter had to limit the ability to tweet, reset password and other functionalities for verified accounts while taking a look at the issue.
As the issues was being addressed, many users noticed the inability to create new tweets.
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