Elon Musk, Apple, Barack Obama Twitter accounts hacked, here's what happened

Twitter accounts of high-profile users and companies were hacked as part of a major bitcoin scam. Here's what went down during the Twitter hack.

The biggest-ever Twitter hack took place earlier today.

Twitter suffered a major hack earlier today targeting high-profile accounts on its platform. The hack sent out bitcoin scam tweets from verified accounts of popular users and even companies like Barack Obama, Apple, Elon Musk, Mike Bloomber, Kanye West and more.

The Twitter hack basically took over multiple major accounts on Twitter. This has now stopped and Twitter has also acknowledged the security issue. But there's still no update on how this security breach happened and who's behind it. This is how the Twitter hack unfolded.

Elon Musk's Twitter account appears to be the first one hacked or the one where the first bitcoin scam tweet was noticed. The scam tweet on Musk's Twitter account read, “Feeling grateful, doubling all payments sent to my BTC address! You can send $1,000, I send back $2,000! Only doing this for the next 30 minutes.”

This is honestly surreal to watch. I thought it wasn't anything special, but then I saw this...
Oh no. #twitterhacked #hacked pic.twitter.com/u5o3yfcon2

— Canary_Tapioca (@ctapioca_art) July 15, 2020

Shortly after, Bill Gates' Twitter account tweeted a similar message. While the tweets were taken down, hackers continued to post bitcoin scams at the same time. This was followed by a series of high-profile Twitter accounts getting hacked and posting bitcoin scam messages. These Twitter accounts include those of Apple, Uber, Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden, Kanye West, Mike Bloomberg and more.

According to a report by Motherboard, hackers got access to an internal Twitter admin tool which was used to take control of the verified accounts. Screenshots of this tool were being shared on underground hacking circles, the report added.

Following the parade of account takeovers on Twitter, the company later responded acknowledging the issue. It also limited tweeting and other functions like changing passwords for verified accounts. Unverified accounts on Twitter could still tweet. Twitter said the investigation is still ongoing and shared its latest update.

We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) 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.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020

“We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools,” Twitter said.

Twitter added that it is looking into other malicious activity that may have taken place during the hack. Twitter locked the accounts that were hacked and limited functionality for verified accounts, it added. The company has also limited access to internal systems and tools while its investigation continues.