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FBI leads probe into Twitter breach ensnaring Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Elon Musk as social giant scrambles to explain
THE FBI is reportedly investigating the massive Twitter hack on Wednesday that saw accounts from Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and others, targeted.
Two sources on Thursday that the is now looking into the breach, .
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The FBI said on Wednesday: “We are aware of today’s involving several accounts belonging to high profile individuals.”
“The accounts appear to have been compromised in order to perpetuate cryptocurrency fraud.”
Other high-profile Twitter accounts, including , , , , and his, wife , were also breached.
The unidentified hackers broke into the accounts on Wednesday and sent fake tweets that offered to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to an anonymous address.
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The message read: "I am giving back to my community due to Covid-19! All Bitcoin sent to my address below will be sent back doubled.
"If you send $1,000, I will send back $2,000! "Only doing this for the next 30 minutes! Enjoy."
Soon after, Twitter temporarily locked down all verified “blue check-marked” accounts, which lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic, so they could investigate.
The company's CEO, Jack Dorsey, tweeted: "Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.”
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"We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened."
Hours later, Twitter said: "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.”
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"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.
"Once we became aware of the incident, we immediately locked down the affected accounts and removed tweets posted by the attackers."
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Twitter said it had also limited functionality for a "much larger group of accounts, like all verified accounts (even those with no evidence of being compromised).”
"This was disruptive, but it was an important step to reduce risk," the platform said before adding that most functions had been restored.
"Internally, we've taken significant steps to limit access to internal systems and tools while our investigation is ongoing."
Of the political figures targeted, the hack mostly appeared to target or other figures on the left, drawing comparisons to the .
Twitter accounts of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Kanye West and more hacked in Bitcoin scam
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US intelligence agencies said that engaged in coordinated attempts to interfere in those US elections through social media tampering and various hacks, including targeting the various campaigns and major party organizations.
might also be a simple demonstration of Twitter’s weak security controls as the US heads into the 2020 presidential election.
Twitter’s shares fell three percent in extended trading after news of the hack broke on Wednesday.
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