Twitter Claims ‘Coordinated Social Engineering Attack’

A Twitter bitcoin scam that hacked the accounts of prominent users like Barack Obama and Elon Musk Wednesday was the result of a “coordinated social engineering attack” targeting employees, the social media company said.

The NY Post reports the attack led to fake posts from more than a dozen popular accounts and forced the company to race to delete the messages and lockout a much larger network of users as it tried to secure the site.

“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,” the company posted on its official Twitter Support account.

“We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf,” the company continued. “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.”

Most accounts should be able to Tweet again. As we continue working on a fix, this functionality may come and go. We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020

All hacked accounts were verified and sent posts out instructing followers to send bitcoin to a specific address in order to receive free bitcoin. The victims included billionaire Bill Gates, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, Kanye West and tech giants like Apple and Uber.

Twitter said it “immediately” worked to take down the tweets and locked down the affected accounts. But the messages were likely widely viewed considering the prominence of the victims.

The company acknowledged that shutting out a much larger group of users was “disruptive” but necessary.

Twitter said it was working to restore account access to their rightful owners but would only turn over the keys “when we are certain we can do so securely.”