Some of the most famous Twitter accounts have been hacked a few hours ago and have posted messages to raise money in a major Bitcoin scam. The accounts of Obama, Musk, Gates or the main Apple have been involved.
A few hours ago the biggest scam that has been lived in the history of Twitter occurred, the accounts of many celebrities and companies have simultaneously published messages announcing addresses to which they could send money to help in the fight against Covid -19 . It appears they have raised over $ 120,000.
To get an idea of the accounts affected by this attack, it is enough to say a few names: Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Kanye West or the same Apple account . All of them are verified, but they have simultaneously published very similar messages , although it should be noted that with slight customization.
These tweets with links to bitcoin pages solicited donations to help in the current situation with Covid-19 and claimed they would match or double them . Unfortunately, it seems that many people have fallen for the scam and, according to Business Insider , at least $ 120,000 has been sent.
The entirety of the money raised is difficult to find out because sometimes the same hackers manipulate the figures to simulate that they have received more and transmit a feeling of trust to the victims. In addition, the use of cryptocurrency will make it difficult to track and retrieve all donations .
This is a screenshot of the tweet posted on Elon Musk’s account , which has since been deleted, as it appears to have been with most of them.
From Twitter they have chosen to stop the problem by blocking all these accounts so that they stop sending false messages when they are ” aware of a security incident that affected the accounts on Twitter.”
Still at this time it appears that many of the accounts are temporarily locked and their recovery emails have been changed so that they will not fall victim to a similar scam again.
As for how this incident could have occurred with already verified accounts, the indications suggest that it was done from the same Twitter platform , which would mean that third-party tools have not been used or hacked these accounts one by one. The main thesis considers that its own platform is the one that has been attacked in order to access the management tools they use internally . Although some sources suggest that employees of the social network have been used for this work, it is not known whether through an complicit attitude or with social engineering.
All this has happened in the last hours, surely we will soon have more information about what happened and, perhaps, who is behind it. At the moment, this has been without a doubt the biggest hacker attack that Twitter has suffered in its 14 years of history.
