Twitter accounts belonging to Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Apple, among other prominent handles, were compromised and posted tweets that appeared to promote a cryptocurrency scam.<\/p>\n
\"Everyone is asking me to give back, and now is the time,\" Mr Gates' tweet said, promising to double all payments to a Bitcoin address for the next 30 minutes.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for Twitter said the company is looking into the issue.<\/p>\n
The sheer number of prominent accounts impacted made it arguably the biggest security incident in Twitter's history.<\/p>\n
A hack like this is particularly concerning not just because of any financial scam that can be run, but because so many world leaders use Twitter - and some, like US President Donald Trump, use it to announce major policy decisions. <\/p>\n
A hack that took over an account belonging to one of those leaders could have devastating consequences.<\/p>\n
Last year, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's account was hacked, raising concerns about whether any account on the platform can truly avoid being compromised. <\/p>\n
The mechanism by which that hack occurred was fixed by Twitter after Mr Dorsey's hack and there's no reason to believe it is to blame here.<\/p>\n
\"We can confirm that this tweet was not sent by Bill Gates,\" a spokesperson for Gates told CNN Business. <\/p>\n
\"This appears to be part of a larger issue that Twitter is facing. Twitter is aware and working to restore the account.\"<\/p>\n
\"Like many others, our @Uber account was hit by a scammer today,\" the company tweeted. <\/p>\n
\"The tweet has been deleted and we're working directly with @Twitter to figure out what happened.\"<\/p>\n
Within minutes of the tweets being posted, a bitcoin account that appeared in some of them showed more than 320 transactions and received more than $113,000.<\/p>\n
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Here is the original post: <\/p>\n
Twitter accounts of Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Apple, Uber, Kanye West and others hacked in cryptocurrency scam - 9News<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Twitter accounts belonging to Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Apple, among other prominent handles, were compromised and posted tweets that appeared to promote a cryptocurrency scam. \"Everyone is asking me to give back, and now is the time,\" Mr Gates' tweet said, promising to double all payments to a Bitcoin address for the next 30 minutes. Continue reading