Twitter Accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk hacked in Bitcoin scam
Late on Wednesday night, the Twitter accounts of Bill Gates and Elon Musk appeared to have been hacked, or fallen prey to a crypto-related scam.
However, it was soon noticed that it wasn’t just these two accounts – The Twitter accounts of Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden, Kim Kardashian West, Warren Buffet, and more appear to have also been compromised.
There is no evidence that the owners of these accounts were targeted themselves. Instead, the hacks appeared designed to lure their Twitter followers into sending money to an anonymous Bitcoin account.
The Biden campaign, for instance, said that Twitter’s integrity team locked down the account within a few minutes of the breach and removed the related tweet. Obama’s office had no immediate comment. The FBI said it was aware of Twitter’s security breach, but declined further comment.
In a tweet, Twitter noted that it was aware of a security incident impacting accounts on Twitter. The San Francisco company said it is investigating and promised an update shortly. It did not reply immediately to requests for comment.
The Twitter hack appears to be far wider than two accounts, with Apple’s and Jeff Bezos’ accounts reportedly targeted as well. Alleged tweets on the matter cite publicly available data to claim that the scam has so far seen over 160 incoming transactions to the mentioned BTC wallet, amounting to collections of over $40,000 (~Rs 30 lac) in Bitcoin already.
Twitter has taken cognisance of the matter, and stated that it is investigating the incident.
Dmitri Alperovitch, who co-founded cyber-security company CrowdStrike, told Reuters news agency: “This appears to be the worst hack of a major social media platform yet.”
Cryptoforhealth is also a registered handle on Instagram, apparently set up contemporaneously to the hack.
The description of the profile read “It was us”, alongside a slightly smiling face emoticon.
The Instagram profile also posted a message that said: “It was a charity attack Your money will find its way to the right place.”
But the motive seems to be clear – make as much money as quickly as they can. The hackers would have known that the tweets wouldn’t stay up for long so this was the equivalent of a “smash and grab” operation.
There are conflicting accounts of how much money the hackers have made and even when a figure is settled upon, it’s important to remember that cyber-criminals are known to add their own funds into their Bitcoin wallets to make the scam seem more legitimate.
Either way, it’s going to be very hard to catch the criminals by following the money. Law enforcement, as well as many angry users, will have some strong questions for Twitter about how this could have happened.
