Many high profile Twitter accounts belonging to Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Kanya West, Jeff Bezos, Apple and Uber were reportedly hacked with hackers using these accounts to ask people to send thousands of cryptocurrency.
Twitter has said that it was looking into the latest incident of hacking of high-profile accounts. The hackers used Bill Gates’ account to write, “Everyone is asking me to give back, and now is the time. I am doubling all payments sent to my BTC address for the next 30 minutes. You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000.”
According to Business Insider, Bitcoin transaction receipts show that the address listed in in the tweets had received more than $55,000.
The tweets were deleted just minutes after they first were posted.
Reacting to the extraordinary incident, Twitter said that it had launched an investigation. Its tweet read, “We are aware of a security incident impacting accounts on Twitter. We are investigating and taking steps to fix it. We will update everyone shortly.” It added, “You may be unable to Tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident.”
Verified users with blue tick next to their Twitter handles are unable to post any tweets while the microblogging site carries out its probe. Verified accounts can like and retweet other Twitter posts. However, non-verified account holders remain unaffected.