The accounts hacked included those belonging to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos...
..., Waren Buffet, Bill Gates, Mike Bloomberg, Elon Musk, Kanye West, and others.
Around 4 pm on 15th July (in the US), many high-profile accounts started tweeting a message saying any bitcoin sent to a link in the tweet will be sent back doubled
Apple and Uber handles were among the first to be impacted, followed by those of Musk and Gates
In a couple of hours, it had taken over the handles of Obama, Biden, Mike Bloomberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos
The scam posted tweets on behalf of Gates and Musk stated a Bitcoin wallet address along with the promise of sending back double the amount of BTC...
...if a user sends a certain amount to the designated wallet first.
In a series of tweets, @TwitterSupport acknowledged the “security incident” and informed users that they maybe be unable to tweet or reset passwords till the micro-blogging platform reviewed the incident
According to Twitter Support, the “coordinated social engineering attack” was executed by people who “successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools”.
"This appears to be the worst hack of a major social media platform yet," said Dmitri Alperovitch, who co-founded cybersecurity company CrowdStrike