Gates, Musk, Bezos hacked: Hackers gained access to the Twitter accounts of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and several otherson Wednesday afternoon to carry out a cryptocurrency scam. Other accounts that were compromised belong to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Apple, Uber and Square's CashApp.
Twitter's first statement regarding the incident was as follows:
A few hours later, the platform provided more details about the “coordinated social engineering attack by individuals who successfully targeted some of its employees by gaining access to internal systems and tools.”
The following tweet was posted by Bill Gates' account, but was later deleted. The same tweet appeared shortly after.
"We can confirm that this tweet was not sent by Bill Gates," a spokesperson for the American businessman and Microsoft. "This appears to be part of a larger issue facing Twitter. Twitter is aware of the situation and is working to restore the account."
A similar tweet from Elon Musk also appeared and was deleted, before another one appeared a short time later.
The accounts of Biden, Obama , and Bezos were also hacked as part of the cryptocurrency scam.
Here are the tweets from Apple and Uber 's accounts :
Following the incident, Uber responded with the following:
According to the data, more than $100,000 has been funneled to the bitcoin address included in the tweets.
Even people who have implemented two-factor authenticationhave reported that their accounts were compromised.
This is not the first time that cybercriminals have compromised the accounts of well-known personalities to carry out a cryptocurrency scam. Elon Musk and Bill Gates have both fallen victim to such an attack.
According to a new update, Twitter has disabled the accounts to address the incident.
It should be noted that the fake tweets from the victims' accounts appeared around the same time.
In total, the accounts that were compromised (according to initial information) belong to:
- Bill Gates
- Elon Musk
- Jeff Bezos
- Joe Biden
- Barack Obama
- Mike Bloomberg
- Warren Buffet
- Apple
- Kanye West
- Wiz Khalifa
- Kim Kardashian
- Floyd Mayweather
- Uber
- CoinDesk
- Binance
- Bitcoin
- Gemini
