Security News > 2020 > July > High-profile Twitter accounts hijacked to push Bitcoin scam. How did it happen?

The Twittersphere went into overdrive on Wednesday as a bunch of prominent, verified Twitter accounts were hijacked and started promoting a COVID-19 cryptocurrency giveaway scam.

The attackers simultaneously compromised Twitter accounts of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg, Apple, Uber, as well as those of cryptocurrency exchanges Binance, Coinbase, KuCoin and Gemini, the CoinDesk news site and other top crypto accounts.

Before Twitter locked the hijacked accounts and deleted the scammy tweets, the attackers apparently received nearly $118,000 in Bitcoin.

Many have pointed out that, given how much US politicians depend on Twitter to keep the citizenry informed about their thoughts and actions, the attackers could have used the access to those accounts to do much more damage.

On 45 of the accounts the attackers initiated a password reset, logged in to the accounts, and sent Tweets, and for eight of the Twitter accounts involved, they downloaded the account's information through the 'Your Twitter Data' tool.

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