After today’s shocking hack, Twitter still has some major explaining to do

[Andy Meek]

• A massive Twitter hack on Wednesday targeted a slew of the service's most high-profile users, including President Obama, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and former Vice President Joe Biden.
• The tweets that started showing up in those users' timelines asked for people to send them Bitcoin.
• Twitter blamed the hack on a "coordinated social engineering" scam.

The Internet's collective jaw hung agape on Wednesday afternoon, as a shockingly comprehensive hack of Twitter expanded to the point that it even touched President Obama's official Twitter account -- which, with almost 121 million followers, happens to be the most-followed account on the platform. "I am giving back to my community due to COVID-19"! read the tweet that was inserted into the former president's tweet stream. "All Bitcoin sent to my address below will be sent back doubled."

That tweet has since been scrubbed, as has similarly-worded tweets posted to the accounts of a slew of high-profile, verified Twitter users including Elon Musk, Bill Gates, former Vice President Joe Biden, Kanye West, Jeff Bezos, and many more. The hack sent shockwaves throughout Twitter, to the point that the service quickly locked the ability of verified users with blue checkmarks to perform actions like tweeting or changing their password. The shadowy perpetrators of this attack -- which played out a little like a real-life, real-time version of the hit Netflix series Money Heist -- seemed to be quite successful in soliciting donations of Bitcoin, and on Wednesday night Twitter finally started the process of answering the only question that mattered: What in the hell happened here?

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After today’s shocking hack, Twitter still has some major explaining to do originally appeared on BGR.com on Thu, 16 Jul 2020 at 01:51:10 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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