The Twitter (TWTR) company was trying to slip down hackers who took over several high profile customers’ accounts by as much as 3 percent in the after-hours exchange.
Tweets posted by Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, Joe Biden, Warren Buffet, Apple, Cashapp etc., have had their accounts hacked on Wednesday afternoon. The scam tells the followers of the account to send some Bitcoin to an address.
A Twitter speaker said that the organization “looked into it,” but didn’t make a statement immediately.
The chaos began when Elon Musk’s Twitter account was seemingly compromised by a hacker intent on using it to run a bitcoin scam. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’ account was also seemingly accessed by the same scammer, who posted a similar message with an identical bitcoin wallet address. Both accounts continued to post new tweets promoting the scam almost as fast as they were deleted, and Musk’s account in particular appears to still be under the control of the hacker as of 5:56PM ET.
Shortly after the initial wave of tweets from Gates and Musk’s accounts, the accounts of Apple, Uber, former President Barack Obama, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, hip-hop mogul Kanye West, and former New York City mayor and billionaire Mike Bloomberg, among others, were also compromised and began promoting the scam.
It’s unclear how widespread the operation is, but it appears to be affecting numerous major companies and extremely high-profile individuals. That suggests someone, or a group, has either found a severe security loophole in Twitter’s login process or third-party app or that the perpetrator has somehow gained access to a Twitter employee’s admin privileges.
