An unknown group of Bitcoin scammers has hacked numerous high-profile Twitter accounts, including Apple's official account.
Unknown Bitcoin scammers have hacked the Twitter accounts of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and many others. Apple's account was also hacked. The cyber criminals posted messages to steal Bitcoins. For example, the following message was posted in Apple's name:
We give back to our community. We support Bitcoin and we believe you should too!
All Bitcoins sent to our address below will be doubled! Only for the next 30 minutes.
Note: We have “removed” the scammers’ Bitcoin address.
The post was only online for a few minutes before it was removed. Apple itself only uses this channel for advertising and does not usually publish posts - so this was the very first tweet published via this channel - but by hackers and not by company representatives. The Twitter accounts affected include:
- Apple
- Joe Biden
- Elon Musk
- Jeff Bezos
- Bill Gates
- Mike Bloomberg
- Kanye West
- Above
- Cash App
- Warren Buffett
- Barack Obama
A spokesman for Bill Gates has already stated:
"We can confirm that this tweet was not sent by Bill Gates. This appears to be part of a larger issue Twitter is facing. Twitter is aware of this and is working to restore the account."
It is therefore assumed that the hackers gained access to the accounts through a vulnerability in the short message service. After all, the affected accounts are said to use two-factor authentication. Twitter itself has not commented on the incident and appears to still be dealing with the problem, as some of the affected accounts, including Elon Musk, are still publishing such tweets. CoinDesk according to The Bitcoin scam appears to have already raised over $100,000. We will update the article as soon as more details become available. (Photo by tashatuvango / Bigstockphoto)
Update – Twitter has issued the following statement:
We are aware of a security incident affecting accounts on Twitter. We are investigating and taking steps to resolve it. We will update everyone shortly.
00:26: Since only verified accounts are affected by the problem, Twitter has temporarily deactivated the posting function. These accounts will only be able to publish posts again once the vulnerability has been fixed.
