Twitter Inc. accounts belonging to top U.S. executives, lawmakers and celebrities were compromised on Wednesday and appeared to be used in an attempt to divert bitcoin from its followers on social media until the company regained control of your site hours later.
After a series of cryptocurrency-related Twitter accounts were hijacked on Wednesday afternoon, Tesla Inc. TSLA,
CEO Elon Musk, with more than 36 million Twitter followers who have been repeated targets of potential bitcoin scammers on the service, tweeted a plea to send him bitcoin shortly after the end of the day’s trading session.
From there, the list of compromised Twitter accounts became a real Who’s Who in real time on the service. Microsoft Corp. MSFT,
founder Bill Gates, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, and former President Barack Obama, AAPL of Apple Inc.,
never used corporate account, BRK.A of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.,
BRK.B,
Warren Buffett, founder and CEO of Amazon.com Inc., AMZN,
Jeff Bezos as well as musician Kanye West tweeted a similar message.
Twitter waited an hour and a half to make a public statement, then restricted the posting of verified site users while stopping other activities throughout the site as engineers tried to regain control. Finally, the Twitter support team said they were “working to get everything back to normal” on Wednesday night.
CEO Jack Dorsey first tweeted during the terrible experience beyond 6 p.m. Pacific time, approximately five hours after Musk’s account originally tweeted the bitcoin message. Dorsey, who also runs Square Inc. SQ,
, which facilitates the transfer of some cryptocurrencies, said Twitter was still “diagnosing” the attack.
TWTR Twitter Actions,
it sank more than 4% after hours and ended the extended session at 3.6%, after closing at $ 35.67. A decrease of that magnitude would remove more than $ 1 billion from Twitter’s market cap.
According to CoinDesk, Twitter accounts for cryptocurrency and crypto influencers such as Gemini, Binance, KuCoin, Coinbase, Charlie Lee of Litecoin, Justin Sun of Tron, bitcoin, Bitfinex, Ripple, the cash app, and CoinDesk, were also compromised. BitTorrent also confirmed the hacks and said it was working with Twitter to get their accounts back to normal.
While Twitter shares fell, bitcoin prices were unaffected by the fiasco. As of Wednesday night, BTCUSD bitcoin futures,
They fell just 0.1%, roughly to the $ 9,200 level. It is unclear if bitcoins were lost in the scam, but some have speculated that the perpetrator of the Twitter attack may have received about $ 100,000 in coins sent to his account.
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