This archive report was first published on 16 July 2020.
On Wednesday, July 15, 2020, Twitter's security was breached in a coordinated social engineering attack, allowing hackers to take control of high-profile and verified accounts.
The hackers sent fake tweets from the accounts of former President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg, and tech billionaires Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk. Celebrities Kanye West and Kim Kardashian West were also targeted.
The fake tweets offered to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to an anonymous Bitcoin address. The Biden campaign stated that Twitter's integrity team locked down the account within minutes of the breach and removed the related tweet.
Obama's office had no immediate comment, while the FBI acknowledged the breach but declined further comment.
The fake tweets were quickly deleted, but screenshots were captured by the Associated Press before they disappeared.
Twitter attributed the incident to a coordinated social engineering attack that targeted some of its employees with access to internal systems and tools.
The company immediately locked down the affected accounts, removed the tweets posted by the attackers, and temporarily blocked verified users from tweeting while the issue was investigated.
The hack drew comparisons to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, in which U.S. intelligence agencies established that Russia engaged in coordinated attempts to interfere through social media tampering and various hacks.
The Bitcoin account mentioned in the fake tweets received almost 12.9 bitcoins, valued at over $114,000, before roughly half that sum was withdrawn.
Bezos, Gates, and Musk are among the 10 richest people in the world, with tens of millions of followers on Twitter.
