Last night when half of the world was asleep due to geographical differences, we saw that the North American users were totally having a rough day on Twitter. This was because according to confirmed reports, Twitter was hacked last night. Now, this was a hack which users couldn’t do anything about because it is reported that the hacker got administrator rights to Twitter. Due to this, the hacker or a group was able to take control of most popular verified accounts on the platform. As per reports, verified accounts of people like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Apple and many others got hacked.
The hacker used this opportunity to run a Bitcoin scam from these accounts where they posted the same message to donate to a Bitcoin address and one estimate suggests that more than 12 BTC have already been sent by users to that address thinking that it was for charity. In reality, this was a scam and many people fell for it while others were saved after realizing the scam.
In response, Twitter locked all the verified accounts’ ability to send out tweets and said that “We have locked accounts that were compromised and will restore access to the original account owner only when we are certain we can do so securely”. At the moment, we know that accounts from people and companies such as “President Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Michael Bloomberg, and Apple” got compromised including Twitter themselves.
Even Twitter CEO had to come out and show support following this scam to stop people from falling prey to it. Jack Dorsey wrote “Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened. We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.”