Scammers hijack Twitter accounts of Joe Biden, Bill Gates and others to promote cryptocurrency

The cause of the breach was not immediately clear.

Hackers on Wednesday took over a series of high-profile Twitter accounts — including those of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates — to promote cryptocurrency scams in a remarkable security breach.

A series of similarly worded tweets promoting bitcoin, a type of cryptocurrency, began appearing from the compromised accounts around the same time on Wednesday. The Twitter account of cryptocurrency exchange Gemini appeared to be swept up in the scam, as did Apple’s official Twitter account.

Hours after it began investigating the incident, Twitter said it appeared to be “a coordinated social engineering attack” against some Twitter employees “with access to internal systems and tools.” Twitter said it was “looking into what other malicious activity [the attackers] may have conducted or information they may have accessed and will share more here as we have it.”

Among the other accounts temporarily compromised were those belonging to musical artist Kanye West, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and former president Barack Obama.

Twitter had temporarily prevented at least some verified users from tweeting in a bid to address the issue. That temporarily kept accounts such as the National Weather Service from tweeting important weather updates and the New York City subway from tweeting train information to commuters. After a couple of hours of interruption, some verified users were again allowed to tweet on Wednesday evening.

Rob Joyce, a longtime National Security Agency official, noted the hackers could have done a lot more with their access to the breached accounts.

The accounts tweeted the same bitcoin wallet address, As of 6 p.m. EDT Wednesday, the wallet had received over $113,000 in bitcoin.

Following the breach, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., wrote to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey asking him to draw on support from the Department of Justice and the FBI in responding to the breach. Hawley also asked Dorsey if any Twitter accounts that employed two-factor authentication were targeted in the attack, and if any Twitter users that did not share the bitcoin promotional messages were compromised.

This is a developing story and will be updated as information becomes available.

Government

• FBI officials say AI is bolstering adversaries, emphasizing need to focus on cyber basics, patching

• Feds accuse China of ‘systematic’ distillation of U.S. AI models

• CIA’s Michael Ellis says cyber intelligence is changing how the agency operates

• Jail time for Maine child in 764 marks turning point in federal law enforcement

Technology

• FCC proposes public scorecard to rate telecoms on anti-robocall efforts

• Pegasus, NoviSpy variant spyware found on devices of Serbian activists

• Wyden seeks upgraded NSA security guidance on commercial VPN use

• The Collective Cyber Defense letter wrote your next vendor questionnaire

Threats

• Chinese espionage groups swarm to exploit triple-link chain of zero-days

• Microsoft discloses two actively exploited zero-days among 974 vulnerabilities

• Russian national extradited to US for alleged involvement in bank-account takeover scheme

• Attackers exploit zero-days in consistently besieged SonicWall product

Policy

• Whistleblower says USPS deploying new, ‘untested’ IT systems governing mail-in ballots

• ‘Watershed 250’ test program in Texas looks to private sector for water cybersecurity help

• Former sexual abuse victims say Grok used their images, videos to train deepfake capabilities

• Cyber threats nudge Trump to sign executive order on foreign equipment in U.S. energy infrastructure