CEO Jack Dorsey issues first statement after Twitter accounts hacked in Bitcoin scam

As verified Twitter accounts of major companies and individuals were compromised on July 16 and were hacked by Bitcoin scammers, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey issued a statement calling it a 'tough day'. After accounts were restored almost after two hours, Dorsey said that everyone at Twitter feels 'terrible' about incident. While he did t provide any details on how exactly and to what extent Twitter's own systems may have been compromised, he ensured that company will share 'everything y can', once y have 'more complete understanding of exactly what happened.' He applauded team Twitter for ir efforts to figure out solution and restore services.

 Twitter issues statement after major security lapse, launches Bitcoin scam investigation

Twitter accounts hacked by Bitcoin scammers

On July 16, Twitter accounts of Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and many or personalities and well as companies were hacked by Bitcoin scammers to launch a bitcoin scam.  scam was traced when Musk’s account issued a tweet at 4:17PM ET that read - “I‘m feeling generous because of Covid-19. I’ll double any BTC payment sent to my BTC address for next hour. Good luck, and stay safe out re!” Soon after, identical tweet was posted from account of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’ account. reafter, a wave of tweets with fake promotion was posted from accounts of personalities like Barack Obama, Kanye West, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg, and Warren Buffet. Twitter accounts of Apple, Uber, Square’s CashApp, and Coinbase were also hacked with intent to post similar messs which contained a bitcoin wallet address that directed to hackers.  

While some of scam tweets were taken down by Twitter, subsequent tweets followed that read, “Feeling grateful doubling all payments sent to my BTC address! You send $1,000, I send back $2,000! Only doing this for next 30 minutes.” BTC address of all tweets from hacked accounts was same including on tweets by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss’ Gemini cryptocurrency exchange. While Gemini claimed that its account was protected by two-factor auntication and company used a strong password, account was hacked into by spammers that earned more than $55,000.

Twitter blocked verified handles before restoring accounts as it probed Bitcoin scam

Twitter takes action 

After maintaining almost an hour of silence, Twitter in its first response at 5:45PM ET said that y are investigating and taking steps to fix it. “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.”

In an unprecedented move, Twitter blocked verified handles from posting anything, as it launched an investigation. company tified that users would be unable to send any tweets from ir verified handle as it had blocked user login and reset passwords rights. However, accounts have w (at time of publishing) been restored. 

Bitcoin scammers hack Twitter accounts of Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk

Former US President Barack Obama, Joe Biden in list of those hacked by Bitcoin scammers