Obama, Kim Kardashian, Apple, Biden, Musk and other high-profile Twitter accounts hacked in crypto scam
A number of high-profile Twitter
accounts were simultaneously hacked on Wednesday by attackers who used
the accounts — some with millions of followers — to spread a
cryptocurrency scam.
In the hours following the initial scam posts, Kim Kardashian West, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Wiz Khalifa, Warren Buffett, YouTuber MrBeast, Wendy’s, Uber, CashApp and Mike Bloomberg also posted the cryptocurrency scam.
While we’re still learning more specifics about how the hack went down, we can report that the hacker leveraged an internal Twitter admin tool to gain access to the high-profile accounts. That reporting was soon confirmed by Twitter’s own account of what happened. On Wednesday evening, the company tweeted that “a coordinated social engineering attack” on employees gave a hacker “access to internal systems and tools.”
Before the scope of the incident became clear, the hack appeared to focus on cryptocurrency-focused accounts. In an initial wave of scam posts, @bitcoin, @ripple, @coindesk, @coinbase and @binance were hacked with the same message: “We have partnered with CryptoForHealth and are giving back 5000 BTC to the community,” followed by a link to a website.
The linked site was quickly pulled offline. Kristaps Ronka, chief executive of Namesilo, the domain registrar used by the scammers, told TechCrunch that the company suspended the domain “on the first report” it received. Hacked accounts shifted to sharing multiple bitcoin wallet addresses as the incident went on, making things more difficult to track.
Twitter first acknowledged the situation at 2:45 p.m. PT Wednesday afternoon, referring to it as a “security incident.”
At first, it appeared that some of the compromised accounts were back under their owners’ control as tweets were quickly deleted. But then, Elon Musk’s account tweeted “hi” after his initial tweet with the scam was deleted. The “hi” tweet also disappeared.
Twitter users reported seeing error messages on the platform as the situation went on. TechCrunch reporter Natasha Mascarenhas saw this error (see below) when she tried to create a threaded tweet. TechCrunch reporter Sarah Perez saw a similar error when trying to post a normal tweet. Both have verified accounts.

Who was hacked
It became clear early on that this situation was not the case of a single account being compromised as we’ve seen in the past, but something else altogether. Even Apple, a company known for robust security, somehow fell victim to the scheme.

Apple’s account was also hacked. This was the account’s first tweet. (Image: TechCrunch)


The hack also hit legendary investor Warren Buffet, a prominent and harsh critic of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. “I don’t have any cryptocurrency and I never will,” Buffet told CNBC in February.
No comments
Thanks for viewing, your comments are appreciated.
Disclaimer: Comments on this blog are NOT posted by Olomoinfo, Readers are SOLELY responsible for their comments.
Need to contact us for gossips, news reports, adverts or anything?
Email us on; olomoinfo@gmail.com