Yesterday, Twitter accounts belonging to some very prominent users were hacked.
A message that was pinned on all the verified accounts belonging to Microsoft Co-founder Bill Gates, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Former US President Barack Obama, Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos among called on users to send money in Bitcoin to double their investments.
It was a scam.
The hackers made away with over Sh100 million.
Twitter, in along post, tweeted about the incident.
“We are aware of a security incident impacting accounts on Twitter. We are investigating and taking steps to fix it. We will update everyone shortly…Our investigation is still ongoing but here’s what we know so far: 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”, it stated in part.
This is not the first prominent hacking. In August 2019, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s account was hacked. The hackers tweeted racial slurs, antisemitic messages and at least one Holocaust denial from Dorsey’s account. Some offensive tweets were up for about 10 minutes, but were later deleted.
On the recent hacking, click to see full list, some users wondered why Twitter was big on censorship and small on cybersecurity.
Twitter had to limit the reach of all verified accounts and those that were hacked for hours.
“We also limited functionality for a much larger group of accounts, like all verified accounts (even those with no evidence of being compromised), while we continue to fully investigate this”, Twitter support posted.
Here are some opinions we sampled.
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