The Twitter accounts of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Barrack Obama, Wiz Khalifa, Mike Bloomberg, Warren Buffet, Floyd Mayweather, XXtentacion, Kim Kardashian, Apple, Uber, and CashApp among others have all been hacked and Targeted in an unprecedented cryptocurrency scam.
What happened?
According to several reports, the attack started with Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla after his compromised Twitter account tweeted that his followers should send $1,000 to get $2,000 in 30 minutes. The reason why Elon Musk was used as the lead in the hack is probably that he is a known supporter of cryptocurrencies.
The Musk tweet was closely followed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates which also shared the same message encouraging people or followers to give back via bitcoin.
Then came a medley of the aforementioned prominent Twitter accounts promoting the Bitcoin scam and sharing the same message.
The Hacker(s)
BBC reports the hacker directed users to the domain address – cryptoforhealth.com (site has been flagged) -which was using the email address mkworth5@gmail.com. The name “Anthony Elias” was used to register the website according to the BBC.
Cryptoforhealth is also a registered handle on Instagram, apparently opened to support the hack. The description of the profile read “It was us”, alongside a slightly smiling face emoticon. The Instagram profile also posted a message that said: “It was a charity attack Your money will find its way to the right place.”
This was apparently done to further amplify and somewhat authenticate the scam.
Twitter response
Responding to the attack, Twitter said it was aware to the hack and it was investigating and taking steps to nit it in the bud. It also took the uncommon action of preventing compromised accounts from tweeting and locking down the accounts adding that it “will restore access to the original account owner only when we are certain we can do so securely”. The social media platform also urged users to change their password.
It wrote: “We are aware of a security incident impacting accounts on Twitter. We are investigating and taking steps to fix it. We will update everyone shortly.
“You may be unable to Tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident. We’re continuing to limit the ability to Tweet, reset your password, and some other account functionalities while we look into this. Thanks for your patience.
“Most accounts should be able to Tweet again. As we continue working on a fix, this functionality may come and go. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible. Our investigation is still ongoing but here’s what we know so far:
“We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our 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. We’re looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed and will share more here as we have it. Once we became aware of the incident, we immediately locked down the affected accounts and removed Tweets posted by the attackers.
“We also limited functionality for a much larger group of accounts, like all verified accounts (even those with no evidence of being compromised), while we continue to fully investigate this. This was disruptive, but it was an important step to reduce risk. Most functionality has been restored but we may take further actions and will update you if we do.
“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. Internally, we’ve taken significant steps to limit access to internal systems and tools while our investigation is ongoing. More updates to come as our investigation continues.”
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.
💙 to our teammates working hard to make this right.
— jack (@jack) July 16, 2020
Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey, the co-founder, and CEO of Twitter said: “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. 
to our teammates working hard to make this right.”
