Twitter accounts of prominent US figures targeted by hackers.
Image Credit: Getty Images
Hackers managed to access the internal systems of Twitter allowing them to access several accounts of US prominent figures, which includes former President Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg, iPhone maker Apple, the app Uber, and several others.
Twitter said that the hackers managed to access the internal system through targeting of employees with access to the internal systems.
The company said, ‘ We’re looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed and will share more here as we have it.’
The hackers put a message from all the hacked accounts, to send bitcoin donations a bitcoin address, with the promise that the celebrity doubles what is given. Through this scam, the hackers managed to run away with $100,000 worth of cryptocurrency, from 300 people. The messages have since been deleted, and Twitter took an extraordinary step, by blocking verified accounts from publishing messages for several hours. The company said it will allow these accounts to post messages, once it is secured to do so.
Chief Executive Jack Dorsey said that the company was currently fixing the problem and that it will announce all the information it will gather about the hack, once they understand what happened.
In a tweet, Jack Dorsey said, ‘Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.’
After the initial breach, several accounts of the prominent figures complained that they were struggling to re-establish control of their accounts. The hackers’ messages were deleted by the owners of the accounts, with some reappearing again after some time. In Elon Mask’s twitter account the hackers’ message reappeared three times after being deleted each time.
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