Twitter was forced to make the unprecedented decision to disable the ability of verified accounts to send tweets following a major hack.
The hack saw Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Kanye West and Michael Bloomberg attempting to fool their millions of followers with a Bitcoin scam.
As well as these major political figures and celebrities, some of the world’s largest brands were also compromised in the attack.
Uber, Nike, Ripple as well as cryptocurrency businesses such as Binance, CoinDesk and Coinbase all sent out the scam.
It is believed the hackers may have netter around $100,000 from the ruse.
Some of the compromised accounts have already come out and confirmed they use two-factor authentication, meaning the hack is likely to have been through Twitter itself.
Not much is known about the hack, however Twitter seemed confirm it was the result of certain staff members being compromised.
“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,” Twitter said.
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.
— Support (@Support) July 16, 2020
What was perhaps more noteworthy, however, was Twitter response to the hack.
To prevent further verified accounts from being compromised and spreading the Bitcoin scam, Twitter made the decision to completely disable the ability for verified accounts to Tweet.
You may be unable to Tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident.
— Support (@Support) July 15, 2020
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey issued an apology of sorts following the attack.
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
