Twitter hackers hit Kanye and Obama
BITCOIN CON IS ‘WORST EVER’ SOCIAL MEDIA CYBER ATTACK
TWITTER bosses today launched an urgent investigation into an “unprecedented” security breach after the accounts of some of the most high-profile US politicians and celebrities were hacked in a scam.
The hackers gained access to the accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West among others, and posted messages asking their millions of followers to send $1,000 (£800) in the digital currency Bitcoin.
About 300 people are believed to have been duped by the message, reading: “I am giving back to my community due to Covid-19! All Bitcoin sent to my address below will be sent back doubled. If you send $1,000, I will send back $2,000!” According to publicly available blockchain records, the Bitcoin address received more than $110,000 (£88,000) from hundreds of transactions before the tweets were taken down and the breached accounts locked.
Twitter bosses were forced into an embarrassing apology and co-founder Jack Dorsey said: “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.”
Twitter revealed that a number of employees had been targeted in a “co-ordinated social engineering attack”, which typically refers to individuals being tricked or intimidated into handing over access to restricted systems.
A number of corporate accounts including those of tech giants Apple and Uber were also targeted, alongside those of prominent
Democrats including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The hack was so widespread that Twitter was forced to block new tweets from every verified user
— those with a blue tick on their account — in a bid to close it down. It said: “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.”
Kayvon Beykpour, head of Twitter’s product team, said: “Our investigation into the security incident is still ongoing but we’ll be posting updates with more detail soon. In the meantime I just wanted to say that I’m really sorry for the disruption and frustration this incident has caused our customers.”
Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of cyber-security company CrowdStrike, said: “This appears to be the worst hack of a major social media platform yet.”
Security sources said a group, Cryptoforhealth, has claimed responsibility for the hack. ⬤ Kanye West has qualified to appear on the presidential ballot in Oklahoma. The necessary paperwork was filed in the rapper’s name yesterday. But his participation remains uncertain afteradviser Steve Kramer earlier said “he’s out.”