The IT Nerd

Happening now is the apparent hijacking of numerous high profile Twitter accounts to promote Bitcoin scams including Apple’s Twitter account as well as the Twitter accounts of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, and others. Given the number of high profile accounts that have been breached, the hack may have originated from a Twitter security vulnerability or a security vulnerability of an app that speaks to Twitter like TweetDeck or Hootsuite or something of that sort. But that isn’t clear at present. But here is what is known at present:

It’s not immediately known how the account hacks took place. Security researchers, however, found that the attackers had fully taken over the victims’ accounts, and also changed the email address associated with the account to make it harder for the real user to regain access.

This is serious and it appears that Twitter is investigating and we should have more details soon. But this is likely a good reminder that you need to make sure that your Twitter accounts are secure so that you don’t become a victim of something like this. Twitter itself has some tips on this.

UPDATE: The list of people who have been pwned is growing:

pic.twitter.com/rcQvTKvbop

— Cameron Rad (@cameronrad) July 15, 2020

UPDATE #2: Twitter has taken the step of stopping anyone with a verified account from tweeting:

You may be unable to Tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident.

— Support (@Support) July 15, 2020

I think this points towards a hack of Twitter at this point. Though I am open to hear alternative explanations for this incident.

UPDATE #3: Most verified Twitter accounts are now once again able to tweet. Twitter is still working on fully fixing the issue:

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.

— Support (@Support) July 16, 2020

UPDATE #4: Jack Dorsey who is Twitter’s CEO has commented….. Via Twitter:

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

This pretty much confirms that Twitter got pwned.

This entry was posted on July 15, 2020 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Hacked, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.