An apparent Bitcoin scam breached around 130 Twitter accounts, as revealed by the social media company on Thursday. Prominent users Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Joe Biden, Elon Musk and many more were targeted.
“For a small subset of these accounts, the attackers were able to gain control of the accounts and then send Tweets from those accounts,” wrote the Twitter Support account, without specifying how many accounts the attackers were able to control. A tweet from Bill Gates’ account said, “Everyone is asking me to give back. You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000.”
Twitter stated it was a coordinated attack targeting its employees with access to internal systems and tools. The company added that it was continuing to assess whether hackers were able to access private data of the targeted accounts.
Twitter reiterated that it was working with impacted account owners. It added that “significant steps” had been taken to limit access to such internal systems and tools while the company’s investigation was ongoing. Tweeting Bitcoin wallet addresses has been temporarily blocked.
The US Senate Commerce Committee has demanded Twitter brief it about the incident next week. Meanwhile, the FBI’s San Francisco division is leading an inquiry into the Twitter hacking, it said in a statement on Thursday, as more Washington lawmakers called for an accounting of how it happened.
The high-profile accounts that were hacked also included rapper Kanye West, Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos, investor Warren Buffett, Microsoft Corp co-founder Bill Gates, and the corporate accounts for Uber Technologies Inc and Apple Inc.

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