The list of US figures whose Twitter accounts were hijacked by scammers on Wednesday US time reads like a Who’s Who of the tech and celebrity worlds: Tesla boss Elon Musk, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, former president Barack Obama, current Democratic nominee Joe Biden, celebrities Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, billionaires Warren Buffett and Mike Bloomberg, the corporate accounts of Apple and Uber, and more besides.
The point of the hack? To lure followers into sending US$1,000 in Bitcoin, with the classic scammer’s false promise of sending back twice as as much.
After a preliminary investigation, Twitter said it believed the incident was “a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools”.