Security News > 2020 > July > Twitter admits 130 A-lister accounts compromised to promote Bitcoin scam after 'social engineering' attack

Twitter has said that around 130 accounts were targeted by miscreants this week as high-profile individuals and businesses had their accounts hijacked to promote a Bitcoin scam.

The estimate comes days after the social media biz admitted the blitz - which snared the accounts of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Apple, Uber and former President Barack Obama - was the result of "Coordinated social engineering".

Based on what we know right now, we believe approximately 130 accounts were targeted by the attackers in some way as part of the incident.

For a small subset of these accounts, the attackers were able to gain control of the accounts and then send Tweets from those accounts.

In the aftermath of the 15 July attack, Twitter said yesterday: "We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools."

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/07/17/twitter_blue_tick_hack_latest/