An unusual and widespread hack on Twitter left the official accounts of various tech moguls, popular personalities, and several tech companies compromised. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and former president Barack Obama were the few, whose Twitter accounts appeared to show a scammed bitcoin giveaway.
The hack remained for several hours on Wednesday afternoon that promoted a bitcoin scam. Mostly the verified users on the platform were targeted by the hack. Even Apple Inc.’s official Twitter account was compromised following the widespread online attack. At the moment, Twitter doesn’t know how the hack happened and which Twitter’s systems became vulnerable.
Now, the social media platform has announced that they are locking all the compromised accounts. Twitter won’t restore the accounts of those attacked accounts until they are certain that they can do it securely. The platform further announced that they would be blocking the new tweets from verified users—even if their account wasn’t attacked.
The accounts of personalities like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Joe Biden, and Michael Bloomberg have two-factor authentication. The fact that such accounts were also compromised because Twitter’s own internal employee tools were exposed in the hack. The bitcoin scam started around 4 PM ET and lasted more than two hours. Twitter didn’t acknowledge the situation for more than an hour after the scam started rolling on Twitter.
We have locked accounts that were compromised and will restore access to the original account owner only when we are certain we can do so securely.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020
We’re continuing to limit the ability to Tweet, reset your password, and some other account functionalities while we look into this. Thanks for your patience.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 15, 2020
Twitter’s official support account, Twitter Support, tweeted at 5:45 PM ET announcing that they are aware of the security incident. The company later announced that they had prevented most of the verified accounts from tweeting. Twitter Support again tweeted that they have limited the ability to tweet thereafter and reset the accounts’ password.
Tough day at Twitter – Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey
Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.
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.
— jack (@jack) July 16, 2020
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted in the evening that it was a tough day for everyone at Twitter. At the same time, Product chief Kayvon Beykpour apologized for the disturbance. He also confirmed that the investigation is still going. He further added that Twitter Support would share the updates of the details of the incident, in the meantime.
Twitter users noticed the internet chaos after Tesla co-founder Elon Musk’s Twitter account began to share the bitcoin scam. The hackers allegedly used Musk’s account until 5:56 PM ET and continued to tweet the scam-promoting tweets.
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