Huge Twitter Hack Scammed Verified Accounts: Elon Musk, Obama, Apple & Others Affected

While you were asleep, Twitter experienced a massive hack that has compromised verified accounts of tech moguls, politicians and even companies.

Verified Twitter accounts of people like former US President Barrack Obama, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Joe Biden and several others were hacked with a fake bitcoin scam posted on their profile, that has managed to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars in bitcoin, going to the hacker.

Reuters

Yes, we are used to seeing Twitter hacks here and there, and scams on social media every now and then, but the scale and magnitude of this hack is unprecedented in Twitter¡¯s history.

Twitter verified user hack

No one knows how this happened, and what was the exact extent of this attack on verified Twitter accounts.

Accounts of politician Micheal Bloomberg, music artist Kanye West, Uber and even Apple were hacked, posting a link to donate to a link through bitcoin to double their money.

Normally one would stay away from such a link or tweet. However, when you see people like Barrack Obama and Bill Gates tweet something like this, it¡¯s really hard to believe something could be fishy.

Twitter

When Twitter finally came across this, it announced that it has gone ahead and locked accounts that were compromised, promising to restore the access when they feel it¡¯s secure. The block was released a few hours later.

What was more mysterious was the fact that most of these accounts had two-factor authentication. Later in the day, Twitter revealed that internal employee tools were compromised in this hack, resulting in two-factor authentication to get bypassed.

Twitter account security

As the day ended and accounts were restored back, Jack Dorsey tweeted, ¡°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.¡±

Twitter: Jack Dorsey

Kayvon Beykpour, product chief of Twitter also stated, ¡°Our investigation into the security incident is still ongoing but we¡¯ll be posting updates from @TwitterSupport with more detail soon. In the meantime, I just wanted to say that I¡¯m really sorry for the disruption and frustration this incident has caused our customers.¡±

Since these were blockchain cryptocurrency transactions, the records are public and the scammers have actually managed to make around $670,000 worth bitcoins thanks to the Twitter hack.

While this hasn¡¯t been the first of many hackings that have been witnessed on the microblogging platform (we remember Netflix getting hacked, even Rahul Gandhi, Vijay Mallya), it surely is the most alarming one, as not only verified accounts of people who are followed by millions of people were hacked, but a tweet to scam people of their money was conveniently put in one of the tweets.

And the breaching of two-factor authentication only makes one think, what else is needed to safeguard our social media and other accounts to make them impenetrable and secure?