Other apparently compromised accounts included those of well-known individuals such as Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, MrBeast, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett, Floyd Mayweather Jr., Kim Kardashian, and Kanye West and companies such as Apple, Uber, and Cash App. The scam then moved to more high-profile accounts with the first such tweet sent from Elon Musk's Twitter account at 20:17 UTC. įorensic analysis of the scam showed that the initial scam messages were first posted by accounts with short, one- or two-character distinctive names, such as This was followed by cryptocurrency Twitter accounts at around 20:00 UTC on July 15, 2020, including those of Coinbase, CoinDesk and Binance. Department of Justice announced charges against three individuals in connection with the incident. ĭmitri Alperovitch, the co-founder of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, described the incident as "the worst hack of a major social media platform yet." Security researchers expressed concerns that the social engineering used to execute the hack could affect the use of social media in important online discussions, including the lead-up into the 2020 United States presidential election. In addition, full message history data from eight non-verified accounts was also acquired. Within minutes from the initial tweets, more than 320 transactions had already taken place on one of the wallet addresses, and bitcoin to a value of more than US$110,000 had been deposited in one account before the scam messages were removed by Twitter. The scam tweets asked individuals to send bitcoin currency to a specific cryptocurrency wallet, with the promise of the Twitter user that money sent would be doubled and returned as a charitable gesture. Three individuals were arrested by authorities on July 31, 2020, and charged with wire fraud, money laundering, identity theft, and unauthorized computer access related to the scam. They appeared to have used social engineering to gain access to the tools via Twitter employees. Twitter and other media sources confirmed that the perpetrators had gained access to Twitter's administrative tools so that they could alter the accounts themselves and post the tweets directly. On July 15, 2020, between 20:00 and 22:00 UTC, reportedly 130 high-profile Twitter accounts were compromised by outside parties to promote a bitcoin scam. The bitcoin addresses involved received about US$110,000 in bitcoin transactions.
A representative scam tweet, from Apple's hacked account.Īt least 130 accounts affected.
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