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- There was a disastrous cyber attack on Twitter that targeted politicians like former President Barack Obama and CEOs like Elon Musk and Bill Gates.
- By hacking these twitter accounts, the assailants posted a link to a fraudulent health website.
- Twitter felt ‘terrible’ for what happened.
There was a disastrous cyber attack on Twitter that targeted politicians like former President Barack Obama and CEOs like Elon Musk and Bill Gates. By hacking these twitter accounts, the assailants posted a link to a fraudulent health website. The tweet had mentioned that they were returning double of any amount of Bitcoin deposited in that link. Twitter felt ‘terrible’ for what happened.
Fraudulent Link and Scam Posts
Joe Biden, a US Presidential Candidate, and New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg were amongst the victims. The former’s tweet read that he was giving back to the community. The post stated that any amount of Bitcoin transferred to the given address would be returned doubled.
Other accounts infiltrated by the hackers include Apple, Kim Kardashian West, Warren Buffett, Uber, CashApp, and Wiz Khalifa.
However, the initially targeted accounts of this scam post were Bitcoin, Ripple, Binance, and Coinbase.
Twitter Apologises to its users
In light of these events, Jack Dorsey, the CEO Twitter, expressed his thoughts and how bad he felt when he got to know about the scam. He tweeted, saying that what a tough day it was at Twitter. Jack also stated that he felt ‘terrible’. Not only this, but he also mentioned that they were thoroughly investigating the matter. He further went on to tell that any updates and news regarding this matter would disclose as soon as they knew what exactly happened.
Following the scam, twitter had stopped all verified accounts from posting or changing their account passwords.
Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.
We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.
💙 to our teammates working hard to make this right.
— jack (@jack) July 16, 2020
The Twitter Tech team stated that most of the accounts would be able to tweet again soon. They also assured the masses that they were working to get things back to normal as soon as possible.
This was disruptive, but it was an important step to reduce risk. Most functionality has been restored but we may take further actions and will update you if we do.
— Support (@Support) July 16, 2020
Twitter and the investigators believe that the scam a ‘co-ordinated social engineering attack’ initiated through the employees who had administrative access. However, Twitter has apologized for the cyberattack and are trying to fix it.
The scam had little to no effect on Bitcoin’s price, but the social networking site shut down for a few hours after the cyber attack.
