Twitter said it blocked the affected accounts as soon as it became aware of the hijacking, deleted tweets posted through “attackers” and prevented all verified accounts from posting messages.
Verified users come with celebrities, hounds and news agencies, as well as governments, politicians, heads of state and emergency services. Most of those users had their ability to tweet a few hours later, Twitter said, adding that compromised accounts would only be reset “when we are confident that we can do it safely.”
The account of US President Donald Trump, which has more than 83 million subscribers, has been hijacked.
The company blamed the attack on the hackers who gained its internal infrastructure.
“We’ve detected what we are a coordinated social engineering attack through other people who have effectively targeted some of our workers with access to internal systems and tools,” Twitter said.
“We know that they used this access to take many highly visual accounts (including verified ones) and tweet on their behalf. We take a look at other malicious activities that would possibly have been performed or the data they have been able to access and we’ll percentage more here, like us.”
He added: “Internally, we have taken vital steps to restrict internal systems and equipment while our investigation is ongoing.”
Previously, some of the most important users of the platform seemed to be suffering from repairing their accounts. In the case of Tesla’s multimillion-dollar lead executive, Elon Musk, for example, a tweet requesting a cryptocurrency was deleted and, some time later, another appeared, and then a third.
Others included rapper Kanye West, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, investor Warren Buffett, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and Uber and Apple accounts. Several accounts of cryptocurrency-focused organizations have also been hijacked.
In total, the accounts involved had tens of millions of subscribers.
“One day for us on Twitter,” said Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s executive leader. “We all feel terrible that this has happened.”
Blockchain.com, which monitors cryptocurrency transactions, said that a total of 12.58 bitcoins, worth approximately $116,000, had been sent to the addresses discussed in fraudulent tweets.
While account commitments are rare, experts were surprised by the scale and coordination of Wednesday’s incident and said it raised questions about Twitter’s cybersecurity.
“This seems to be the worst hacking of a primary social media platform to date,” Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, told news agency.
Ina Fried, a leading generation correspondent at Axios, the “very smart” scam.
“Bitcoin is anything that can be turned into money very quickly, anonymously,” he told Al Jazeera. “Is it a little bit for Barack Obama to ask for money? Yes, but in the context of COVID relief, maybe not so much. Now with Bill Gates and some of the others, he seemed a little more out of place. But you think about your typical email scam, and it’s more believable than that.”
He added: “Again, he says you deserve to be aware, that you deserve to think twice, that you deserve never to give cash indirectly, that you deserve to move to the charity you’re going through.”
Twitter has been through hackers in the past.
Last August, Dorsey’s account was stealing and he used to tweet racist and vulgar comments.