Some of the world’s richest and most influential politicians, celebrities, tech moguls and companies were the subject of a massive Twitter attack on Wednesday. Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Kim Kardashian West, and Bill Gates were among the accounts that tweeted asking millions of followers to send money to a Bitcoin address.
All the tweeted messages from the accounts shared a similar language. Kanye West’s account tweet said he is “giving my fans back”; the message from Bezos’s account said that “I had decided to give back to my community”; and Musk’s account said “feel grateful.”
Bezos, Musk and Gates are among the 10 richer people in the world, based on Forbes calculations. According to the Associated Press, the three men have a combined value of $ 362 billion.
Twitter said in a statement that the company detected what they believed to be “a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal tools and systems.”
“We are investigating what other malicious activity or information they may have accessed and will share more here when we have it,” the company tweeted.
Twitter said that once they realized what happened, they “immediately blocked” the hacked accounts and removed the tweets sent on their behalf. Twitter also limited functionality for all verified accounts, including those that showed no evidence of compromise, while investigating the problem.
“We have blocked compromised accounts and will restore access to the original account owner only when we are confident that we can do so safely,” Twitter said. “Internally, we have taken significant steps to limit access to internal systems and tools while our investigation is ongoing. More updates will be made as our investigation continues.”
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted several hours later that it was a “difficult day for us on Twitter.”
“We all feel terrible that this has happened,” added Dorsey. “We are diagnosing and we will share as much as we can when we have a more complete understanding of what exactly happened.”
A spokesperson for Bill Gates confirmed that a tweet sent from his account was not sent by Gates himself. “This appears to be part of a bigger problem facing Twitter,” the spokesperson said.
Joe Biden’s campaign released a similar statement, saying: “Twitter closed the account immediately after the breach and removed the related tweet.”
Companies, including Apple and Uber, apparently were also hacked. After the incident, all of Apple’s tweets appeared to have been removed.
There have been at least 363 transactions since the tweets were posted, according to the tracking website blockchain.com. So far, the account has received more than $ 118,000.
Shortly after the incident, many verified users reported that they were no longer able to tweet, including media companies.
Several accounts of the National Weather Service were affected in bad weather. According to The Weather Channel, they affected accounts in the Illinois and Missouri regions as tornado warnings were issued.
Verified accounts that tried to tweet received an error message saying, “To protect our users from spam and other malicious activity, we are unable to complete this action at this time.”
Twitter acknowledged that some users’ features may have been disabled while investigating: “You may not be able to tweet or reset your password as we review and address this incident.”
About three hours later, Twitter’s support service said, “Most accounts should tweet again.”
“As we continue to work on a solution, this functionality can come and go,” they tweeted. “We are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”
Unverified Twitter users used the mass hack to get to the spotlight on the social media site.
Many users scoffed at the situation, focusing on how verified accounts or “blue checks” were forced to retweet other accounts to post anything on their profiles.
The attack also prompted Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri to write a letter to Dorsey on Wednesday, saying that some of the affected accounts “were allegedly protected by two-factor Twitter authentication.”
“I am concerned that this event may represent not only a coordinated set of separate hacking incidents, but rather a successful attack on Twitter’s security. As you know, millions of its users trust their service not only to publicly tweet but also to Communicate privately through their direct message service, “Hawley wrote. “A successful attack on your system’s servers poses a threat to the privacy and data security of all its users.”
Hawley urged Dorsey to immediately work with the Justice Department and the FBI on the matter, and urged Dorsey to answer a list of questions, even if the attack threatened the security of President Trump’s account.
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