CEO Jack Dorsey said in a tweet that it was a “tough day” for everyone on Twitter. (Representative)
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating the hacking of Twitter, according to sources familiar with the situation, as more and more Washington lawmakers have alarmed the breach of prominent accounts on the social media platform.
Earlier, the law enforcement agency said that the hackers appeared to be committing cryptocurrency fraud after taking control of the Twitter accounts of celebrities and politicians, including Joe Biden, Kim Kardashian, Barack Obama and Elon Musk.
The FBI did not immediately respond to a question about this by investigating Twitter.
One day after the violation, it was unclear whether hackers could see the private messages sent by account holders. US lawmakers are concerned about future attacks.
“While this scheme seems financially motivated … imagine if these bad actors had a different intention of using powerful voices to spread disinformation in order to potentially interfere with our elections, disrupt the stock market or disrupt our international relations”, said US Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat, said in a statement.
Twitter Inc. said that hackers had targeted employees who had access to its internal systems and “used that access to take control of many highly visible (including verified) accounts and to tweet on their behalf”.
Other prominent accounts that have been hacked include rapper Kanye West, founder of Amazon.com Inc. Jeff Bezos, investor Warren Buffett, Microsoft Corp co-founder Bill Gates, and corporate accounts. for Uber Technologies Inc and Apple Inc.
Twitter stocks fell just over 1% on Thursday afternoon after reducing previous losses. In an extraordinary step, he temporarily prevented many audited accounts from posting messages while investigating the breach.
The hijacked accounts tweeted messages telling users to send bitcoins and their money would be doubled. The publicly available blockchain records show that the apparent scammers received more than $ 100,000 in cryptocurrency.
CEO Jack Dorsey said in a tweet on Wednesday that it was a “tough day” for everyone on Twitter and is committed to sharing “all we can when we have a more complete understanding of what’s going on. happened”.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
