Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and presidential election nominee Joe Biden are among a host of powerful people to fall victim to mass hacking by suspected cryptocurrency scammers.
Twitter accounts of a several high-profile companies and individuals were taken over for more than two hours today and made to send messages urging people to hand over their Bitcoin with the promise of sending back double.
Other victims include Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Uber, Bill Gates, Kanye West and businessman and former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg. While little is known about the scale of the attack, its targets shared similar messages on Twitter asking their followers for donations.
A tweet on Apple’s account shares a Bitcoin address, with the message: ‘We are giving back to our community. We support Bitcoin and we believe you should too! All Bitcoin sent to our address below will be sent back to you doubled!’
Twitter said: ‘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.’
Verified, or ‘blue ticked’ accounts have been unable to send tweets as the social media site tries to starve the hackers of targets. It is thought the scammers could have exploited a loophole in Twitter’s login process or somehow acced an employee’s admin privileges.
A public register of the Bitcoin address referenced in the tweets shows some people had fallen for the scam and had sent up to £91,000.
Most of the tweets were deleted within a number of minutes, but many had been retweeted thousands of times.
The fraudulent messages were posted after several high-profile cryptocurrency companies’ Twitter accounts shared malicious links earlier today.
Brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, known for their legal battle with Facebook, believe all major accounts in the industry have been affected.
The pair, who founded cryptocurrency company Gemini said their account had been hacked. In a warning Tyler tweeted: ‘This has resulted in @Gemini, @Coinbase, @Binance, and @Coindesk, tweeting about a scam partnership with CryptoForHealth. DO NOT CLICK THE LINK! These tweets are SCAMS.”
Cameron added: ‘ALL MAJOR CRYPTO TWITTER ACCOUNTS HAVE BEEN COMPROMISED. 2FA / strong password was used for @Gemini account. We are investigating and hope to have more information shortly.’
The campaign team for Trump rival Joe Biden said Twitter locked the presumptive Democrat nominee’s account immediately and removed the hackers’ tweet.
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