Ahmed Shaami
Twitter accounts of Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Apple were compromised on Wednesday among other high-profile Twitter accounts. Twitter believes this is an attack on its employees with access to the company’s confidential tools.
“We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools,” Twitter’s support team said late Wednesday.
The attackers not only hacked the accounts but also posted tweets to promote a cryptocurrency scam. The accounts tweeted requesting for donations via Bitcoin.
Verified accounts of many celebrities was compromised and hackers tweeted asking people to send bitcoin to an address to get back double.
Here’s a screenshot of a tweet that went out from Bill Gates twitter account.
“Once we became aware of the incident, we immediately locked down the affected accounts and removed Tweets posted by the attackers,” Twitter said.
Responding to this big issue. CEO Twitter 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.
💙 to our teammates working hard to make this right.
— jack (@jack) July 16, 2020
Hashtag #twitterhacked is trending all over the world on Twitter.
Most accounts should be able to Tweet again. Twitter is working on fixing the issue. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.
