This archive report was first published on 16 July 2020.
On July 15, 2020, Twitter faced a massive security breach when hackers targeted the accounts of prominent US figures, including billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates, in an apparent Bitcoin scam.
The official accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kanye West were also compromised, with the hackers requesting donations in cryptocurrency.
“Everyone is asking me to give back,” a tweet from Mr. Gates’ account said. “You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000.”
Twitter acknowledged that the hack was a coordinated attack targeting its employees with access to internal systems and tools.
“We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf,” the company said in a series of tweets.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted: “Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.”
Emergency Response ¶
Twitter took the extraordinary step of stopping many verified accounts from tweeting altogether, and password reset requests were denied.
However, by 20:30 EDT (00:30 GMT Thursday), users with verified accounts started to be able to send tweets again, although Twitter said it was still working on a fix.
Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of cyber-security company CrowdStrike, described the hack as “the worst hack of a major social media platform yet.”
Other prominent figures targeted included Kanye West, his wife Kim Kardashian, former US President Obama, and former US Vice-President Joe Biden.
