This archive report was first published on 16 July 2020.
Twitter Hack: Coordinated Attack on Systems Compromised Prominent Accounts ¶
On July 15, 2020, Twitter accounts belonging to prominent individuals, including Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Apple, were compromised in what Twitter described as a coordinated social engineering attack.
According to Twitter, the attackers targeted some of the company's employees with access to internal systems and tools, allowing them to post tweets that appeared to promote a cryptocurrency scam.
The compromised accounts, which also included those of former President Barack Obama, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian West, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, and Mike Bloomberg, posted similar tweets soliciting donations via Bitcoin to their verified profiles.
"Everyone is asking me to give back, and now is the time," Gates' tweet said, promising to double all payments to a Bitcoin address for the next 30 minutes. All the tweets were subsequently deleted.
Twitter immediately locked down the affected accounts and removed the tweets posted by the attackers. The company also locked accounts that were compromised and will restore access to the original account owner only when they are certain they can do so securely.
"We all feel terrible this happened," Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said in a tweet. "We're diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened."
As the company investigates the breach, they are also looking into what other malicious activity the attackers may have conducted or information they may have accessed.
Published on July 16, 2020, at 08:58:22 UTC.
