Hackers on Wednesday afternoon coordinated simultaneous attacks on prominent crypto Twitter accounts and also took over some high profile Twitter accounts including the likes of Bill Gates , Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, President Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, Wiz Khalifa, Warren Buffett and Apple.
The hackers who pumped a crypto giveaway scam appeared to have compromised the Twitter accounts of leading exchanges, individuals, and at least one news org.
The hack was in two waves; one message targeted at high profile individuals and another targetted at cryptocurrency companies.
The message for the individuals, as can be seen in the message below, says “I am giving back to the community. All Bitcoin sent to the address below will be sent back doubled! If you send $1,000, I will send back $2,000. Only doing this for 30 minutes.”
Another sample message is shown below in the case of Jeff Bezos’ account.
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, and CoinDesk.
The hackers sent messages sent within minutes of each other, prompting 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 and Coindesk’s accounts were targeted. Attempts to reach the hacked entities were not immediately successful.
Twitter acknowledged the situation at 2:45 PT Wednesday afternoon (10.45 PM WAT), referring to it as a “security incident.”
However, some of the messages were removed soon after being posted, with executives of affected companies tweeting out warnings not to fall for the scams.
Within the first hours of the attack, people were tricked into sending over $118,000 to the hackers.
