Hackers have managed to access Twitter’s “internal systems and tools” to compromise some of the most popular accounts on the social network, including those of Apple, Uber, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden.

The hackers also compromised the accounts of various cryptocurrency firms, including Binance, Coinbase, CoinDesk, Gemini, and others. The compromised accounts tweeted out a message telling victims they would be “giving back” and asked for a Bitcoin donation sent to their address, with the promise of doubling it. It linked to a CryptoForHealth website asking for donations.

Twitter claimed a “coordinated social engineering attack” had successfully “targeted some” of its employees. The social media firm’s report contradicts one published by Motherboard, that alleges the hacked was enabled by one of its workers.

In a series of tweets, Twitter wrote:

“We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf. We’re looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed and will share more here as we have it.”

The bitcoin hackers managed to make over $120,000 with the attack, even though Twitter quickly reacted to stop the attack from spreading. Verified accounts with blue ticks temporarily stopped being able to tweet altogether, and password reset requests started being denied.

Twitter said “significant steps” were being taken to limit access to internal systems and tools. Dmitri Alperovitch, who co-founded cyber-security company CrowdStrike, said this “appears to be the worst hack of a major social media platform yet.”

On Instagram, an account created under the CryptoForHealth name with a description reading “it was us” posted a message saying “it was a charity attack. Your money will find its way to the right place.”

The identities of the attackers are still unknown.

Source: https://www.cryptocompare.com/email-updates/daily/2020/jul/16/