Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, Barack Obama and Bill Gates were among the notable figures whose Twitter accounts were hacked Wednesday in an apparent digital currency scam.
A tweet on Elon Musk’s account 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!”
The tweet on Musk’s Twitter included the same block chain address in a tweet that was pinned to Bill Gates’ Twitter account around 1:34 PST.
Later in the afternoon, hackers posted similar tweets on the official accounts of Barack Obama, Uber, Mike Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, Wiz Khalifa and Kanye West, among others.
TechCrunch reports that @Apple, which has zero tweets and 4.6 million followers, was also hacked and tweeted out the phishing message.
High profile digital currency-related twitter accounts @bitcoin, @ripple, @coindesk, @coinbase and @binance were all reportedly compromised.
Twitter put out a statement noting that it was aware of a “security incident impacting accounts on Twitter” and warned users that they might be unable to tweet or reset their passwords while the company worked to fix the breach. Some, if not all, verified users temporarily lost the ability to tweet Wednesday afternoon.
CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted:
“Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.
We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.”
This is a developing story; the Associated Press contributed to this report.