Jack Dorsey said, “We all feel terrible, it happened.”
Massive hacking – described as “a coordinated social engineering attack” by Twitter – targeted several high-level users last night, including former US President Barack Obama, Tesla’s Elon Musk, investor Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos from Amazon. In an article, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey summed up the attack, saying it was a “tough day for us on Twitter”.
“We all feel horrible that this has happened. We will diagnose and share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of what exactly happened,” tweeted Mr. Dorsey.
Difficult day for us on Twitter. We all feel terrible.
We will diagnose and share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of what exactly happened.
???? to our hard-working teammates to get it right.
– jack (@jack) July 16, 2020
To an extraordinary extent, Twitter has disabled the ability to tweet from verified accounts for about two hours after scammers trying to trick people by sending cryptocurrency bitcoins hijacked user profiles.
A tweet that appeared on Elon Musk’s Twitter feed said: “Happy Wednesday! I’m giving Bitcoin back to all my followers. I’m doubling all payments sent to the Bitcoin address below. You send 0.1 BTC, I send 0.2 BTC! ” The offer was valid “only for 30 minutes,” the newspaper said, AFP news agency reported.
“It’s a scam, don’t participate!” Gemini cryptocurrency co-founder Cameron Winklevoss has warned from his official Twitter account.
In a series of articles, the microblogging site later said that most of the accounts – which were targeted – “should be able to tweet again.”
Most accounts should be able to tweet again. As we continue to work on a fix, this feature can come and go. We are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.
– Twitter support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020
“We have detected what we think is a coordinated social engineering attack by people who have successfully targeted some of our employees who have access to internal systems and tools,” one of the articles read.
Other high-profile accounts that were affected included those of rapper Kanye West, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and corporate accounts for Uber and Apple.
Several accounts of organizations focused on cryptocurrency have also been hacked. In total, the affected accounts had tens of millions of users.
This is not the first time that Twitter has reported a massive hack. In March 2017, the accounts of Amnesty International, the French Ministry of the Economy and the North American BBC Service were robbed by hackers who were allegedly loyal to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Last August, a series of insulting or racist messages were published on the personal account of Twitter founder Dorsey without his knowledge.
(With contributions from Reuters, AFP)
