Update: With the Twitter hack seemingly under control now, full service has been resorted to verified accounts and Wednesday's scam tweets have been deleted.
A major Twitter hack on Wednesday gave people another reason to avoid the often-controversial social media platform, as prominent accounts got roped into the mess and started promoting a clear Bitcoin scam.
What looks to have been a coordinated series of scam messages were tweeted from verified accounts of Apple, Elon Musk and former Vice President and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, among others, according to our survey of the damage of the Twitter hack.
The exploit – like the one captured above before it was deleted – happened on the 14th anniversary of Twitter's public launch date, July 15. It asked users to send Bitcoin currency to a specific cryptocurrency wallet code.
In return, the scam promised to send twice as much money back to giving users (the latter half of that being the scam...don't expect the check to be in the mail).
This coordinated hack lead Twitter to temporarily shut down the ability to tweet from verified accounts. Service has since been restored and Twitter has issued an explanation as to what happened along with its next steps.
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.July 16, 2020
As the moment, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's profile has a bio that simply says #bitcoin. We're unsure if that existed before Wednesday's Twitter hack or if it's a remnant of the attack.
We'll continue to follow the Twitter hack of 2020 and what it means for the social media platform on which multiple heads of state, including US President Donald Trump, can tweet provocative policy messages on a daily basis.
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