The verified accounts belonging to former President Barack Obama, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian West, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, and Mike Bloomberg, has been hacked by scammers.
These accounts posted similar tweets soliciting donations via Bitcoin to their verified profiles on Wednesday.
“Everyone is asking me to give back, and now is the time,” Gates’ tweet said, promising to double all payments to a Bitcoin address for the next 30 minutes.
In a tweet on Wednesday, Twitter’s support account wrote:
“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.”
A little more than an hour after the attack began, Twitter moved to prevent holders of verified accounts from tweeting. Non-verified accounts could still tweet, however.
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
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.
— Support (@Support) July 16, 2020
We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf. We’re looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed and will share more here as we have it.
— Support (@Support) July 16, 2020
Around 8:30 pm ET, roughly three hours after Twitter first said that it was investigating the apparent hack and a little more than two hours after it shut down tweeting for some accounts, Twitter said the majority of accounts had been restored to full functionality.
“Most accounts should be able to Tweet again. As we continue working on a fix, this functionality may come and go.” the company said. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”
The sheer number of prominent accounts impacted made it arguably the most significant security incident in Twitter’s history.
