This archive report was first published on 16 July 2020.
July 16, 2020
Twitter was hit by a major hacking incident yesterday, with several prominent users' accounts compromised.
The hackers, who targeted verified accounts belonging to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, former US President Barack Obama, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, among others, sent out messages asking users to send money in Bitcoin to double their investments.
However, the messages were a scam, and the hackers made away with over Sh100 million.
Twitter acknowledged the incident in a statement, saying that they were aware of a security incident impacting accounts on the platform and were investigating the matter.
According to Twitter, the hackers successfully targeted some of their employees with access to internal systems and tools, which led to the coordinated social engineering attack.
This is not the first prominent hacking incident on Twitter. In August 2019, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's account was hacked, with the hackers tweeting racial slurs, antisemitic messages, and at least one Holocaust denial from Dorsey's account.
Some users have questioned Twitter's focus on censorship over cybersecurity, with one user saying, 'Twitter should have invested less in censorship and more in cyber security…'
Twitter had to limit the reach of all verified accounts and those that were hacked for hours, and also limited functionality for a much larger group of accounts while they continued to investigate the incident.
