Bitcoin scammers on Wednesday night took control of Us prominent personalities’ verified Twitter accounts, posting Covid-19 ‘charity’ messages to scam followers.
Among the people whose accounts were compromised include Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Uber Technologies Inc., Apple Inc. and Michael Bloomberg.
The message posted promised followers double the money they send to the address provided within 30 minutes.
According to TrendsMap.com, the phrase “I am giving back to my community due to COVID-19” was tweeted 3,330 times in a span of four hours.
Addressing the issue, Twitter said it was aware of the security breach and all verified accounts were momentarily blocked from tweeting.
“We are aware of a security incident impacting accounts on Twitter. We are investigating and taking steps to fix it. We will update everyone shortly,” Twitter said.
We are aware of a security incident impacting accounts on Twitter. We are investigating and taking steps to fix it. We will update everyone shortly.
— Support (@Support) July 15, 2020
Twitter further told the verified accounts that “you may be unable to Tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident”.
The hackers tweeted using Twitter for Web App with IP addresses in New York, London, Spain, Italy, Jakarta and Tokyo.
Bloomberg says that the Bitcoin address tweeted by the hackers has been sent over 12 Bitcoins, worth more than $110,000 (Ksh1.1 million).
At some point, screenshots were shared showing that even the verified account for Twitter Support had been compromised, a fact we could not ascertain.
Companies such as Apple lost all its tweets. By the time of going to press, Apple had zero tweets.
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