Twitter on Thursday confirmed that hackers accessed its internal systems to hijack some of the platform's top accounts, including those held by US presidential candidate Joe Biden, reality TV star Kim Kardashian, former US President Barack Obama, and billionaire Elon Musk, among others, and used them to promote a cryptocurrency scam.
Twitter said employees with access to its internal systems had been successfully targeted by hackers who "used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf."
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"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," the social media giant said.
Twitter temporarily took the extraordinary step of preventing for several hours at least some verified accounts from publishing messages altogether. It said it would restore access only when it was certain it could do so securely.
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
Publicly available blockchain records show the apparent scammers received more than $100,000 worth of cryptocurrency.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said the company was investigating the incident and pledged to share "everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened."
"Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened," he said in a tweet.
Shares in the social media company tumbled almost 5% in trading after news of the hack broke.
In the hours after the initial breach, some of the platform's biggest users appeared to be struggling to re-establish control of their accounts. In the case of billionaire Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, for example, one tweet soliciting cryptocurrency was removed and, sometime later, another one appeared, and then a third.
Among other high profile accounts affected: rapper Kanye West, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, investor Warren Buffett, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and the corporate accounts for Uber and Apple. Several accounts of cryptocurrency-focused organizations were also hijacked.
Altogether, the affected accounts had tens of millions of users.
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.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020
Biden's campaign said it was "in touch" with Twitter, according to a person familiar with the matter. The person said the company had locked down the Democrat's account "immediately following the breach and removed the related tweet." Tesla and other affected companies were not immediately available for comment.
Several experts said the incident raised questions about Twitter's cybersecurity.
"It's clear the company is not doing enough to protect itself," said Oren Falkowitz, former CEO of Area 1 Security.
Falkowitz, who now chairs the Silverado Policy Accelerator, said that, in a way, the public had dodged a bullet so far.
"We are lucky that given the power of sending out tweets from the accounts of many famous people, the only thing that the hackers have done is scammed about $110,000 in bitcoins from about 300 people," he said.
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