Bill Gates Twitter Account Until Barack Obama Hacked For Spamming Bitcoin

Ilustrasi Twitter (Photo by Yucel Moran on Unsplash)

JAKARTA - A hacker managed to take over a number of Twitter accounts belonging to several technology figures such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Apple, and even former president of the United States (US) Barack Obama. The accounts were created as if they were spreading tweet spam related to the Bitcoin currency.

Quoted from BBC International, Thursday, July 16, the hacker also took over the accounts of world celebrities Kanye West, Kim Kardashian West, and even Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos and Mike Bloomberg. In these hacked accounts, hackers posted tweets asking for donations via Bitcoin on their accounts on Wednesday.

"Everyone is asking me to give back, and now is the time. By sending $ 1,000, I'm sending you $ 2,000 back. I promise to double all payments to Bitcoin addresses over the next 30 minutes," the hacker tweeted on Bill's Twitter account. Gates.

Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.We're diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened. 💙 to our teammates working hard to make this right.

- jack (@jack) July 16, 2020

A spokesman for Bill Gates immediately confirmed the tweet in the Gates account, "We can confirm that this tweet was not sent by Bill Gates. This appears to be part of a larger problem facing Twitter. Twitter is aware and working to recover the account."

In response to this, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also immediately conducted an internal check on the security system of the microblogging platform. "We are diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of what's going on," added Dorsey.

According to publicly available blockchain records, in that short time, the links displayed in the tweets of these figures' accounts have received hundreds of revenues totaling more than 100,000 US dollars. This means that many Twitter users are deceived and tempted by this.

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.

- Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020

An hour after the mass attack began, Twitter immediately moved quickly to take over the hacked account. This works with verified Twitter accounts or blue ticks, while unverified accounts can still be tricked by hackers.

"You may not be able to Tweet or reset your password while we review and resolve this incident. Some other account functionality (will also be limited)," said the Twitter Support account.

Suppose, three hours after the hack, Twitter confirms the public that it has returned the hacked account to its owner. It is known, this hacking incident is the largest in the history of Twitter. The hack concerns not only bitcoin scams, but because so many world leaders are using Twitter.