The Great Twitter Hack: Lots of famous people’s twitter accounts got hacked this week

• The account hijacks hit some of the most prominent users on the social media platform, including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden.

• @Kirk generated over $100,000 in a spate of hours by gaining access to an internal Twitter tool.

• The FBI has launched an investigation into the incident and Congress wants answers from Twitter’s management.

• 130 accounts were targeted, Twitter said in a statement on Thursday, though not all of them were compromised

Who got hacked?

Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos, Apple’s official account, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Obama, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Uber, Wiz Khalifa, Floyd Mayweather, Cash App, MrBeast, XXXTentacion, parody account TheTweetOfGod … the list goes on and on.

Several high-profile Twitter accounts were hacked earlier this week as part of what appeared to be a cryptocurrency scam.

“a 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.”

CEO Jack Dorsey

So how bad was it?

The hack underscored the vulnerability of social media services like Twitter, which are used by world leaders and government agencies to communicate with the public

The breach was so serious that Twitter was forced to briefly disable all tweeting from verified accounts on Wednesday.

Only about $120,000 in bitcoin has been deposited to the hacker’s accounts, according to Reuters.

An Inside Job?

A person involved in the underground hacking scene told TechCrunch that a hacker, who goes by the handle “Kirk” — likely not their real name — generated over $100,000 in a matter of hours by gaining access to an internal Twitter tool, which they used to take control of popular Twitter accounts.

The hacker used the tool to reset the associated email addresses of affected accounts to make it more difficult for the owner to regain control. The hacker then pushed a cryptocurrency scam that claimed whatever funds a victim sent “will be sent back doubled.”

The hackers targeted high-profile accounts that had the potential to spread the scam as far as possible.

.The FBI has launched an investigation into the incident and Congress wants answers from Twitter’s management.

As of writing on Friday afternoon, here what we do and don’t know about what happened.