UPDATE: Calls Grow To Investigate Twitter After Recent 'Hack'
Contrary to Twitter executives' testimony before congress, Wednesday's breach of users' accounts also revealed the big tech company manually edits trends and manufactures content.
Twitter handle @Lunarixus tweeted. "Proof that Twiiter can shadowban and censor people. It was speculated before but this screenshot of the user admin panel that employees have access to just prove it."
Senator Josh Hawley wrote to the company to explain the extent of the breach and how this was possible. "@jack @Twitter work with the FBI and DOJ to secure your platform. Now. Then give the public an accounting of how much of their personal info you lost today," he tweeted with a screenshot of his letter attached.
FBI has reportedly opened an investigation into the attack
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Twitter has confirmed it took the drastic step of blocking new tweets from every verified user Wednesday, following the unprecedented hacks of accounts including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Michael Bloomberg, and Apple.
The attack began when users noticed that Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Twitter account was seemingly compromised by a hacker intent on using it to run a bitcoin scam.
The account issued a tweet at 4:17PM ET which read, “I‘m feeling generous because of Covid-19. I’ll double any BTC payment sent to my BTC address for the next hour. Good luck, and stay safe out there!” The tweet also contained a bitcoin address.
The Musk account's tweet was later deleted and replaced by another one: “Feeling grateful doubling all payments sent to my BTC address! You send $1,000, I send back $2,000! Only doing this for the next 30 minutes.” This tweet was also later deleted.
The tweets posted to Gates’ account echoed the Musk tweets, with an identical BTC address attached. It was also deleted shortly after posting.
Shortly after the initial wave of tweets from Gates and Musk’s accounts, the accounts of Apple, Uber, former President Barack Obama, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, hip-hop mogul Kanye West, and former New York City mayor and billionaire Mike Bloomberg, among others, were also compromised and began promoting the scam.
Twitter's own Square’s Cash App account was also compromised; So were popular crypto Twitter accounts, including those of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss’ Gemini cryptocurrency exchange and widely used wallet app Coinbase.
Some people fell for the scam and sent money to the attached BTC.
Twiter revealed that its own internal employee tools were compromised and used in the hack. "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."
CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted, "Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened. We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened. To our teammates working hard to make this right."
Brendon Marotta on Gab observed that Twitter started banning users who share the screenshots of the hack.