Social media has gone haywire since news of scammers hijacking the social media accounts of notable personalities, broke into the airwaves. The attack happened on Wednesday afternoon, and a number of unsuspecting followers have already fallen victim.
Tech billionaires, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, were among targets of the recent attack by hackers and scammers.
The scammers posted tweets about giving back to the community by doubling every transfer done to the attached Bitcoin wallet. A Bitcoin address was then attached to the tweets.
The address on the tweets by the various accounts appeared to be the same. The addresses direct to the same cryptocurrency wallet.
At the time of gathering this report, the address has received over 300 transactions, with a total of 12.2BTC received. This is over $100,000 dollars at the current value as at 11pm on July 15, 2020.
Other accounts that were successful hacked in this batch of attack are those of Joe Biden, Kanye West, Michael Bloomberg, Apple Inc., and Uber.
The tweets received lots of reactions before they were taken down. However, many unsuspecting followers had already fallen victim and made transfers to the attached address.
Twitter, through it’s verified support handle, tweeted that it has launched investigations into the events, and taken steps to curb the security breach. Twitter has restricted the ability to tweet, and reset password, especially for some verified accounts.
“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.”
The affected accounts have been locked down, and would only be restored when Twitter feels it is secure to do so.
This event is the latest in the series of vulnerabilities Twitter have experienced. Last August, Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, had his Twitter account compromised. The hacker successfully sent out racist tweets before the hack was reversed, and the account retrieved.