Published 09:00 IST, July 16th 2020

Twitter hacking 'coordinated social engineered attack'; says 'most functionality restored'

Social media giant Twitter labelled the latest attack on verified Twitter accounts of major companies and individuals as a coordinated social engineering attack

Reported by: Koushik Narayanan
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Social media giant Twitter labelled latest attack on verified Twitter accounts of major companies and individuals as 'a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools'. 

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 purported Bitcoin scammers to launch a bitcoin scam. Providing latest update, Twitter, in its statement, said that investigation was ongoing and furr detailed into steps taken immediately by company to respond to attack. 

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In latest update provided by Twitter, social media giant said that attackers who targetted ir employees used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on ir behalf. Furr, Twitter said that it immediately locked down affected accounts and removed Tweets posted by attackers. Functionality was also limited in large group accounts. Twitter furr said that it had locked accounts which had been compromised and that it will lift lock once it's secure to do so.  

READ | CEO Jack Dorsey Issues First Statement After Twitter Accounts Hacked In Bitcoin Scam

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'Coordinated social engineering attack'

 READ | Twitter Blocked Verified Handles Before Restoring Accounts As It Probed Bitcoin Sca

READ | BitTorrent CEO Justin Sun Anunces $1 Million Bounty On Bitcoin Scammers, Decries Hacking

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Twitter accounts hacked by Bitcoin scammers

 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.

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READ | Former US President Barack Obama, Joe Biden In List Of Those Hacked By Bitcoin Scammers

09:00 IST, July 16th 2020