Last night a bunch of high profile twitter accounts, the likes of Kanye West, Elon Musk, and others, were hacked.
The tweets posted by the hacked accounts were asking for followers to send Bitcoin, a virtual currency thats partially anonymous, to a Bitcoin address.
An example of one of the tweets posted.
There were many more accounts targeted; mainly those in the Tech and cryptocurrency industry, and it’s believed the attack was carried out by a group of unknown hackers who gained access to twitter staff tools, where they were then able to reset the email and passwords for these high profile accounts.
Twitter said they found: “what we believe to be a coordinated engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.”
The hackers are believed to have netted over $50k in Bitcoin from the scam, which Twitter have apologised for.
“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,” Twitter said.
The CEO also added that it was a tough day for Twitter, and that: “We all feel terrible this happened. We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened,” Dorsey said.
Twitter then later briefly blocked some verified accounts from tweeting, to prevent other accounts who fell victim to the hackers putting similar tweets out. The block has now been lifted, as they said they were trying to get things back to normal “ as soon as possible”.
