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1.42%Twitter Hack Takes Down Joe Biden, Elon Musk Accounts in Widespread Bitcoin Scam Attack
Hackers pumping a crypto giveaway scam appear to have compromised the Twitter accounts of leading exchanges, individuals and at least one news org.
By Danny Nelson
Updated Sep 14, 2021, 9:31 a.m. Published Jul 15, 2020, 7:59 p.m.
UPDATE: This is an ongoing situation. More has come to light. Click here for full coverage of the Twitter hack.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
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Read more: Everything We Know About the Bitcoin Scam Rocking Twitter’s Most Prominent Accounts
Read more: Obama, Biden, Netanyahu, Musk: Here’s a List of Every Hacked Twitter Account
Read more: Twitter Breach Reactions: Security Professionals Offer an Early Assessment
Read more: Chainalysis Says Bitcoin Scammed From Twitter Users Is ‘On the Move’
Read more: Twitter Says ‘Coordinated Social Engineering’ Attack Caused Bitcoin Scam
Read more: Twitter Hack Used Bitcoin to Cash In: Here’s Why
Hackers pumping a crypto giveaway scam appear to have compromised the Twitter accounts of leading exchanges, individuals and at least one news organization.
- The unknown attackers tweeted identical messages promising that they were "giving back 5000 BTC ($45,889,950) to the community" on Wednesday afternoon from the accounts of Gemini, Binance, KuCoin, Coinbase, Litecoin's Charlie Lee, Tron's Justin Sun, Bitfinex, Ripple, Cash App, Elon Musk, Uber, Apple, Kanye West, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett, Barack Obama and CoinDesk.
- The messages prompted readers to claim their rewards at an included link associated with "Crypto For Health."
- Changpeng Zhao, Binance's CEO, attempted to warn Twitter users that the Tweet was a scam within five minutes of the hack. But the attackers appear to have hidden his response and hacked him too.
- Kucoin was also targeted in the hack. CoinDesk's account was as well.
- Attempts to reach the hacked entities were not immediately successful.
- At least some of the compromised accounts have multi-factor authentication enabled, including CoinDesk's.
- The address linked to the scam appears to have received more than 11.3 BTC, or roughly $103,960.
- Shares of Twitter fell as much as 3% in after-hours trading.
Danny Nelson
Danny was CoinDesk's managing editor for Data & Tokens. He formerly ran investigations for the Tufts Daily. At CoinDesk, his beats include (but are not limited to): federal policy, regulation, securities law, exchanges, the Solana ecosystem, smart money doing dumb things, dumb money doing smart things and tungsten cubes. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL tokens, as well as the LinksDAO NFT.
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