In what could be described as a very funny night, hackers went on a rampage ripping unsuspecting people of their money using giveaway format.
You didn’t know about it? Here’s how it played out…
Official Twitter handles belonging to high profile individuals such as Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Bill Gates were hacked Wednesday to promote a Bitcoin scam.
Others affected were Elon Musk, Kanye West, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett and the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos.
According to Hacker News, hacked people and organisations include Gemini, #Binance, Binance’s CEO, #Coinbase, CoinDesk, and KuCoin.
All the compromised accounts sent out tweets promising to double the money sent by anyone sending money via Bitcoin within the next 30 minutes, Bloomberg said.
The official twitter handles of Uber and Apple posted similar tweets with the scam soon after.
Apple Twitter account, with over 4.6 million followers, was devoid of any tweet as at 22.50 GMT.
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Cybersecurity news platform, The Hacker News, said the bitcoin account involved had already received nearly $1,060,000.
One unconfirmed report said the scammers may have stolen as much as $10m.
Meanwhile, Twitter has said it is investigating the issue, while later putting on hold thousands of verified accounts.
Twitter said:
You may be unable to Tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident.
Twitter shares declined 2.3% post-market.
Some of the messages sent out by the hackers using popular handles include:
This is a terrible occurrence but it leaves every man to be security conscious more than ever while also shunning giveaways that look too good to be true.
Again, not all that glitters is gold. Ponder on that.
