A large number of Twitter accounts from major figures and companies around the world have been hacked. The official accounts of Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and even Apple, have been requesting users to send Bitcoin (BTC) so as to receive double the amount of BTC back.
Twitter Accounts Hacked Ask for Bitcoin
A large number of Twitter accounts have been hacked requesting for Bitcoin from the entire community.
One of the Twitter accounts that got hacked, the one of Elon Musk, posted:
“Feeling grateful, doubling all payments sent to my BTC address! You send $1,000, I send back $2,000! Only doing this for the next 30 minutes.”
Then, the hacker posted the Bitcoin wallet where users could send their funds to. The account was able to receive 12.86 BTC from the community that of course were not doubled later. At the time of writing, 12.86 BTC is equal to over $110,000 USD.
This has affected a large number of users considering that many of them were not aware of these kinds of scams.
The CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, addressed the community saying that they had a very tough day and that they felt terrible with what happened. He has also informed they are currently doing an investigation in order to understand what happened.
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1283571658339397632?s=20
According to Twitter support, they have detected a coordinated social engineering attack by people that targeted some of the company’s employees and that had access to internal systems and tools.
At the moment, Twitter decided to limit the functionality of the entire number of verified accounts, even if they were not affected and compromised. This was certainly a disruptive issue that would push Twitter to improve its systems and solutions.
Twitter continues with the investigation with significant limits to internal systems and tools in order for the investigation to continue. The accounts that were compromised remain locked and they will be unlocked once they know there are no risks in doing so.
This was disruptive, but it was an important step to reduce risk. Most functionality has been restored but we may take further actions and will update you if we do.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020
Back in 2017 and 2018, a large number of accounts on Twitter were impersonating large figures and asking for Bitcoin deposits. Users were sending their funds to these accounts after they were promised to receive double the coins back. Of course, this was never real and once the user sent the coins to the hacker, these were not going to be available anymore for the user.
Binance
Crypto.com
Ledger
1XBIT
