The FBI has launched an investigation into the hacking incident on Twitter that saw about 130 accounts compromised.
The accounts belonged to high profile personalities including former US President Barack Obama, Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk, Kanye West, Apple, among many others.
“At this time, the accounts appear to have been compromised in order to perpetuate cryptocurrency fraud,” read a statement from the FBI’s San Francisco office, which is leading the investigation. “We advise the public not to fall victim to this scam by sending cryptocurrency or money in relation to this incident.”
The attack has been taken seriously with allusions that it could become a global twitter crisis. The FBI usually opens investigations in response to national security threats or attacks from foreign adversaries.
Read: Bitcoin Scammers Hack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Joe Bidden Twitter Accounts
The hackers compromised the high profile accounts to scheme twitter users and obtain about $120,000 in Bitcoin. Twitter said it was also investigating the attack and taking the necessary steps to fix the problems.
Following the attack, certain verified users were not able to use their accounts or tweet for a couple of hours. It is still not clear whether the hackers accessed the DMs and personal information belonging to the high profile users.
Investigations currently reveal that the hackers gained control of an “admin” tool within Twitter, thereby gaining access to the high profile accounts. The social media platform said that it had detected “a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.”
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