Twitter was plunged into chaos when unknown hackers compromised the accounts of high profile figures like Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, and corporates like Apple, to name a few, in an apparent Bitcoin scam. These are just a few of the major, million-plus-follower Twitter accounts that were breached.
The accounts of several major cryptocurrency players were hacked to include – the exchanges Bitfinex, Gemini, and Coinbase, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, the news site Coindesk, and many others. The hackers soon breached accounts of high-profile tech executives, companies, celebrities, and politicians.
All tweets had the same message across the hacked accounts requesting for donations in the cryptocurrency. The hackers may have netted more than $100,000 in a couple of minutes.
To control the tide of tweets, twitter disabled all the high profile accounts for half an hour. The Twitter support team said, “We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.”
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