On Wednesday, Twitter faced an unprecedented massive attack on accounts belongings to various US personalities and companies.
The official Twitter accounts of Apple, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others were hijacked by scammers to promote dubious cryptocurrency deals — even the official Twitter Support account has also been hacked.
The fake messages that appeared on Musk’s, Gates’s and other accounts, offered to double the amount of bitcoins for all users who sent $1,000 in bitcoins to a particular wallet. And many Twitter users fell for the scam tweets and transferred money to the given bitcoin address.
According to Blockchain.com — which monitors transactions made in cryptocurrencies, said the bitcoin wallet mentioned in the fraudulent tweets received almost 330 transactions and a total of 12.58 bitcoins, worth nearly $116,000. However, confirmed bitcoin transactions are irreversible. That is, if you send someone bitcoin, it is impossible to reclaim it.
It’s unclear how exactly the accounts were hacked. Many of the accesses were temporarily blocked and were back online after a short time. Twitter’s response has come very late, more than an hour after the scam started. “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.” — they have posted from the official support account.
Meanwhile, Tron founder and BitTorrent CEO Justin Sun have put a $1 million reward on the heads of those responsible for the hacking incident.
