On Thursday, Twitter announced that about 130 accounts were targeted in a hack that resulted in the accounts of high profile users tweeting a cryptocurrency scam. Twitter Support shared details of an investigation into the attack on Wednesday afternoon that resulted in the accounts of people including Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Bill Gates sharing a tweet soliciting bitcoin transfers. Twitter said it immediately locked all of the accounts and deleted the tweets upon learning of the incident on Wednesday, as well as briefly blocking all verified accounts from tweeting.
Twitter said, “Based on what we know right now, we believe approximately 130 accounts were targeted by the attackers in some way as part of the incident. For a small subset of these accounts and then send Tweets from those accounts.” They added, “we have also been taking aggressive steps to secure our systems while our investigations are ongoing. We’re still in the process of assessing longer-term steps that we may take and will share more details as soon as we can.”
The scam encouraged users to send bitcoin to a single address that was shared by all the affected accounts and ultimately collected more than $100,000. The company said they are working with the owners of the accounts that were affected to assess whether non-public data related to the accounts was compromised.
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