Twitter said hackers accessed its internal systems to hijack some of the platform’s top voices including U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden, reality TV star Kim Kardashian, former U.S. President Barack Obama and billionaire Elon Musk and used them to solicit digital currency.

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 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,” the company 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.

Publicly available block chain records show the apparent scammers received more than $100,000 worth of cryptocurrency.  Chief Executive Jack Dorsey earlier said the company was diagnosing the problem 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.

Apple, Elon Musk and Joe Biden were among the accounts compromised in a broadly targeted hack that remained mysterious hours after taking place. Those accounts and many others posted a message promoting the address of a bitcoin wallet with the claim that the amount of any payments made to the address would be doubled and sent back — a known cryptocurrency scam technique.

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.

Source- Reuters