A number of high-profile Twitter accounts were simultaneously hacked on Wednesday by attackers who used the accounts — some with millions of followers — to spread a cryptocurrency scam.
Apple, Elon Musk and Joe Biden were among the accounts compromised in a broadly targeted hack that remained mysterious hours after taking place. Those accounts and many others posted a message promoting the address of a bitcoin wallet with the claim that the amount of any payments made to the address would be doubled and sent back — a known cryptocurrency scam technique.
In the hours following the initial scam posts, Kim Kardashian West, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Wiz Khalifa, Warren Buffett, YouTuber MrBeast, Wendy’s, Uber, CashApp and Mike Bloomberg also posted the cryptocurrency scam.
While we’re still learning more specifics about how the hack went down, we can report that the hacker leveraged an internal Twitter admin tool to gain access to the high-profile accounts.
That reporting was soon confirmed by Twitter’s own account of what happened. On Wednesday evening, the company tweeted that “a coordinated social engineering attack” on employees gave a hacker “access to internal systems and tools.”
Twitter first acknowledged the situation at 2:45 p.m. PT Wednesday afternoon, referring to it as a “security incident.”
It became clear early on that this situation was not the case of a single account being compromised as we’ve seen in the past, but something else altogether. Even Apple, a company known for robust security, somehow fell victim to the scheme.
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