Twitter hack: Musk, Obama, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, others compromised

A few hours ago, many verified high profile accounts began "tweeting" about 'giving back to the community' through Bitcoins.

Tweets from the accounts of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Apple went out, with slightly varying iterations of a message that requested the public to send a certain amount (mostly $1,000) and promised to double it up in return.

The messages from the high profile accounts, which have extra security measures and are less likely to be hacked, puzzled Twitter users.

But, soon, it became evident that this was a coordinated defrauding attempt by cryptocurrency scammers who had taken over the accounts.

They all tweeted varying messages but the Bitcoin address shared was the same in most of the cases.

As the attack surfaced, Twitter came into action, confirming the incident and that it is working on a fix.

"We are aware of a security incident impacting accounts on Twitter. We are investigating and taking steps to fix it," the company said, adding that the affected accounts have been locked for now and the tweets posted by the attackers have also been removed.

While the investigation is still on, the early detection by Twitter found that some of its employees were targeted by scammers in a coordinated "social engineering attack."

As a result, they were tricked into giving away access to Twitter's internal systems and tools, which allowed the scammers to take over several high profile company and individual accounts and promote scams through them.

When Twitter locked the affected accounts to investigate, it also disabled functionalities like resetting passwords, tweeting for all verified accounts, including those not affected, to prevent further hacks.

Now, it has restored those functionalities, but the compromised accounts still remain locked, with the company saying it "will restore access to the original account owner only when we are certain we can do so securely."

Beyond that, the company has also said it has limited access to its internal systems for further security.

"Internally, we've taken significant steps to limit access to internal systems and tools while our investigation is ongoing," the company said. "More updates to come as our investigation continues."

Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of the company, tweeted out it was a "tough day" for them.