Kanye West was amongst high profile names that had their Twitter accounts hacked in an organized cryptocurrency scam.
A Mass hack started with Elon Musk’s Twitter account on July 15 tweeting out out a message to send him bitcoin at a particular address with a promise of doubling it.
Immediately, Kanye West’s Twitter account alongside Bill Gates, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Barack Obama, Ye’s wife Kim Kardashian, Joe Biden, and more all sent out a similar message. Even official accounts for Uber, Cashapp, and Apple were used to send the message.
Twitter Support through their handle explained that there has been a security breach on their side and that they have shut down all the accounts involved.
They claim that the attack was a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of their employees with access to internal systems and tools.
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.
— Support (@Support) July 15, 2020
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.
— Support (@Support) July 16, 2020
Once we became aware of the incident, we immediately locked down the affected accounts and removed Tweets posted by the attackers.
— Support (@Support) July 16, 2020