Social media is a place where literally no person is safe. Time and again we come across news of celebrity accounts or handles getting hacked. While we all spend our days in quarantine at home during the lockdown, in an attack unfolded on Wednesday evening, celebrities, billionaires and politicians including Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Joe Biden and Barack Obama are among the Twitter users whose handles got hacked by Bitcoin scammers. Surprisingly, the bug did not affect US President Donald Trump’s Twitter handle.
According to a report in DailyMail.com, the attack happened on Wednesday evening, July 15, 2020, where the Twitter handles of presidential candidate Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, former US President Barack Obama, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian West among others got affected.
Taking to Twitter, CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted, “Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened. We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.” Sharing a blue heart emoji further, Jack Dorsey mentioned that his team at Twitter is working hard to make everything right.
Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.
— jack (@jack) July 16, 2020
We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.
💙 to our teammates working hard to make this right.
Moving on, while Jack Dorsey re-tweeted a tweet made by Twitter support in regard to the issue. On the official handle, Twitter support tweeted, “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.” They mentioned that the breach is believed to be a ‘coordinated social engineering attack, ‘ a term that is used to explain how the psychological manipulation of individuals is done to gain access to restricted systems. Also Read: Kylie Jenner’s 2-Year-Old Daughter Stormi Casually Sits Holding A Louis Vuitton Mini Handbag Worth A Staggering Rs 88k- PIC INSIDE
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.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020
Meanwhile, while Twitter immediately reacted to the breach, they mentioned in their tweets that they are looking into what other malicious activity the hackers might have conducted. Twitter also made a smart move of immediately locking down the affected accounts and made sure they removed Tweets posted by the attackers. They also mentioned that they have taken significant steps to limit access to internal systems and tools while the investigation continues. On the other hand, the corporate accounts of Apple and Uber were also affected by this breach.
Image source: Instagram/ Kim Kardashian, Elon Musk