CEO Jack Dorsey issues first statement after Twitter accounts hacked in Bitcoin scam

As verified Twitter accounts of major companies and individuals were compromised on July 16 and were hacked by the Bitcoin scammers, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey issued a statement calling it a 'tough day'. After the accounts were restored almost after two hours, Dorsey said that everyone at Twitter feels 'terrible' about the incident. While he did not provide any details on how exactly and to what extent Twitter's own systems may have been compromised, he ensured that the company will share 'everything they can', once they have 'more complete understanding of exactly what happened.' He applauded team Twitter for their efforts to figure out the solution and restore the services.

 Twitter issues statement after major security lapse, launches Bitcoin scam investigation

Twitter accounts hacked by Bitcoin scammers

On July 16, the Twitter accounts of Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and many other personalities and well as companies were hacked by the Bitcoin scammers to launch a bitcoin scam. The scam was traced when Musk’s account issued a tweet at 4:17PM ET that read - “I‘m feeling generous because of Covid-19. I’ll double any BTC payment sent to my BTC address for the next hour. Good luck, and stay safe out there!” Soon after, the identical tweet was posted from the account of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’ account. Thereafter, a wave of tweets with the fake promotion was posted from accounts of personalities like Barack Obama, Kanye West, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg, and Warren Buffet. Twitter accounts of Apple, Uber, Square’s CashApp, and Coinbase were also hacked with the intent to post similar messages which contained a bitcoin wallet address that directed to the hackers.  

While some of the scam tweets were taken down by Twitter, subsequent tweets followed that read, “Feeling grateful doubling all payments sent to my BTC address! You send $1,000, I send back $2,000! Only doing this for the next 30 minutes.” The BTC address of all the tweets from the hacked accounts was the same including on the tweets by the Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss’ Gemini cryptocurrency exchange. While Gemini claimed that its account was protected by two-factor authentication and the company used a strong password, the account was hacked into by the spammers that earned more than $55,000.

Twitter blocked verified handles before restoring accounts as it probed Bitcoin scam

Twitter takes action 

After maintaining almost an hour of silence, Twitter in its first response at 5:45PM ET said that they are investigating and taking steps to fix it. “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.”

In an unprecedented move, Twitter blocked the verified handles from posting anything, as it launched an investigation. The company notified that the users would be unable to send any tweets from their verified handle as it had blocked the user login and reset passwords rights. However, accounts have now (at the time of publishing) been restored. 

Bitcoin scammers hack Twitter accounts of Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk

Former US President Barack Obama, Joe Biden in list of those hacked by Bitcoin scammers