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- Scammers have hacked Twitter and taken control of dozens of world leader’s accounts and major business handles
- The hackers used the opportunity to scam other users, by encouraging them to give money to cryptocurrency accounts, in order to have their money doubled.
- Twitter intervened shortly after the scam was posted, but in order to fix the issue, it had to temporarily lock all verified accounts
- Almost all celebrities, politicians and major businesses have blue-tick verified accounts and were barred from tweeting overnight due to the hack
- The problem has now been fixed, however, the hack was arguably the worst ever to hit Twitter, in terms of the sheer amount of high-profile users affected
Twitter has been forced to lock all blue-tick verified accounts after the social media site was hit by a massive cryptocurrency scam.
Scammers managed to break-in and take control of thousands of famous accounts, asking their followers to send money to Bitcoin in order to double their cash.
Among those whose accounts were hacked are world leaders such as Barack Obama and Joe Biden and billionaires Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
The hack even targeted cryptocurrency accounts, with several tweeting out their support for the scam.
Bitcoin, Ripple, CoinDesk, CoinBase and Binance all sent out the same message encouraging users to hand over their money.
“We have partnered with CryptoForHealth and are giving back 5000 bitcoin to the community,” the tweets said.
The hacked tweets also linked to a website, which has since been taken down.
Officials say it’s too early to speculate how many people lost money through the scam.
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.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 15, 2020
Twitter confirmed it was aware of the hack within an hour of it first occuring overnight.
But, while trying to fix the problem, the social media giant had to silence some of the world’s most powerful people and brands.
All blue-tick users were unable to tweet or change their accounts as Twitter worked to stop one of its worst hacks in company history in terms of the sheer number of people affected.
High-profile individuals, such as Elon Musk and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, have been targeted by hackers in the past, but today’s widespread attack indicates internal controls were breached.
Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.
— jack (@jack) July 16, 2020
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.
The issue has now been resolved, with blue-tick verified users now able to access their accounts and Tweet again.
However, the large-scale hack is likely to have a lasting impact on Twitter’s security controls as it works to maintain user trust.
