Thu 16 July 2020:
Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, tech luminary Elon Musk, musician Kanye West among those affected
Twitter Inc. was hit with a widespread attack Wednesday that allowed hackers to take over an array of accounts including those of celebrities, politicians and billionaires such as Bill Gates, Kanye West, Joe Biden and Barack Obama, as well as Apple Inc. and other companies.
The accounts of former President Barack Obama, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, financier Warren Buffet and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, TV star Kim Kardashian, rapper Kanye West were also affected.
Screen grabs taken from the accounts appear to show them posting a link asking for Bitcoin donations, variously saying in some form they are “giving back” to their communities or fans by doubling any donations.
“Everyone is asking me to give back,” a tweet from Mr Gates’ account said. “You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000.”
Twitter said it was a “co-ordinated” attack targeting its employees “with access to internal systems and tools”.
“We know they [the hackers] used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf,” the company said in a series of tweets.
It added that “significant steps” were taken to limit access to such internal systems and tools while the company’s investigation was ongoing.
Meanwhile, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted: “Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.”
Emergency response
Twitter earlier had to take the extraordinary step of stopping many verified accounts marked with blue ticks from tweeting altogether.
Password reset requests were also being denied and some other “account functions” disabled.
By 20:30 EDT (00:30 GMT Thursday) users with verified account started to be able to send tweets again, but Twitter said it was still working on a fix.
Dmitri Alperovitch, who co-founded cyber-security company CrowdStrike, told Reuters news agency: “This appears to be the worst hack of a major social media platform yet.”
On the official account of Mr Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX chief appeared to offer to double any Bitcoin payment sent to the address of his digital wallet “for the next 30 minutes”.
“I’m feeling generous because of Covid-19,” the tweet added, along with a Bitcoin link address.
The tweets were deleted just minutes after they were first posted.
But as the first such tweet from Musk’s account was removed, another one appeared, then a third.
A spokesman for Bill Gates told AP news agency: “This appears to be part of a larger issue that Twitter is facing.”
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