Biden, Gates, Musk: Bitcoin scam breaches some of world's most prominent Twitter accounts

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/suspected-bitcoin-scammers-take-over-twitter-accounts-bill-gates-elon-n1233948


July 15, 2020, 5:00 PM EDT / Updated July 15, 2020, 7:55 PM EDT
By David Ingram and Kevin Collier


The Twitter accounts of Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden, Elon Musk and many other high-profile people and companies became pawns Wednesday in one of the most visible cyberscams in the internet's history.

Suspected bitcoin scammers grabbed control of accounts belonging to the rich and famous, as well as lower-profile accounts, for more than two hours during the afternoon and tricked at least a few hundred people into transferring the cryptocurrency.

A tweet typical of the attack sent from the account of Bill Gates, the software mogul who is the world's second-wealthiest person, promised to double all payments sent to his Bitcoin address for the next 30 minutes.

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The tweets began showing up sometime after 3 p.m. Eastern time, and the attack appeared to be continuing on scores of Twitter accounts more than two hours later. It was not immediately clear why Twitter wasn’t able to shut down the attack quickly. At around 6 p.m. ET, Twitter appeared to stop verified accounts from tweeting as the company tried to slow the spread of the scam.

The temporary shutdown of verified accounts had the collateral effect of halting some government agencies’ ability to communicate with the public. Official Twitter feeds for the National Weather Service, for example, were silenced even as there was a tornado watch in Illinois.

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Kelley Robinson, a security advocate for Authy, a company that provides two-factor authentication, said the scale of the attack indicated the hackers had gotten administrative access at Twitter itself.

"It's really unlikely that Bezos, Musk, and especially Biden all had credentials compromised," she said over Twitter Direct Message.

Some of the accounts have huge followings. Gates' has 51.1 million Twitter followers, while Musk's has 36.9 million. Apple's account has 4.5 million.

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