Twitter accounts of Biden, Musk, Gates and others hit in major hack to spread Bitcoin scam

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The state Twitter accounts of Apple, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden and others were hijacked on Wednesday by scammers trying to trick persons into sending them Bitcoin.

In an enormous hack, the list of compromised accounts grew rapidly to add Barack Obama, Uber, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Kanye West, bitcoin specialty organizations and many others.

Among the cryptocurrency accounts hacked were those of Bitcoin, Ripple, Coindesk and Coinbase.

Posts, most of that have been deleted quickly, were fired faraway from the high-profile accounts telling persons they had thirty minutes to send $1,000 in Bitcoin to be repaid twice as much.

"This is a scam, usually do not participate," Gemini cryptocurrency exchange co-founder Cameron Winklevoss warned in a tweet from his official account.

"This is actually the same attack/takeover that other major crypto Twitter accounts are experiencing. Be vigilant."

Comments and posts at Twitter indicated thousands of dollars in Bitcoin might have been sent to the scammers' digital account.

Twitter acknowledged the situation at 1.45am UAE time on Thursday.

The reason for the breach was not immediately clear, however the scale and the scope of the situation suggested it was not limited to an individual account or service.

Shares of Twitter tumbled almost 4 % in trading following the market close.

The tech giant said that it had been aware of a “security incident impacting accounts on Twitter".

It said it was investigating and attempting to correct it, and promised an update shortly.

"Given the accounts that got hacked recently [Apple, Uber, Gates, Musk, etc], I am now leaning towards this as an internal compromise of a Twitter system, not an API attack from a social aggregator service," Bitcoin authority and author Andreas Antonopoulos said in a tweet.

A version of the scam invited persons to click on a web link at which they might be exploited.
Source: https://www.thenational.ae

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