Twitter diagnoses system to investigate breach after major accounts get hacked

Twitter accounts of personalities such as Bill Gates and Elon Musk were reportedly hacked by apparent Bitcoin scammers, sending the platform into a security frenzy.

Last night, Twitter witnessed a data breach situation where accounts of well-known personalities were reportedly hacked. Acknowledging the attack, the platform has released a statement stating they were investigating the issue. "You may be unable to Tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident," they said.

Among those who found there accounts reportedly hacked include Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Kanye West, Joe Biden and Jeff Bezos.

The affected accounts were locked down immediately once the security breach came to light. Cryptocurrency-related tweets, made by the alleged attackers were removed.

"We're diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened," said Jack Dorsey, CEO, Twitter.

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As the team at Twitter set about digging into the issue, platform functionality for several accounts, all verified ones irrespective of whether there was any evidence of them being compromised, remained wonky. Eventually, in the hours that followed, Twitter shared bits and pieces about what the team had discovered so far.

"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," the platform said, adding that they were looking into the extent of malicious activity that might have been conducted and the information that was accessed during the account.