Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said it had been a “tough day” for the team after numerous high-profile Twitter accounts were hacked in a Bitcoin scam on Wednesday, July 15.
“Tough day for us at Twitter,” Dorsey said in a tweet posted at 6.20 p.m. PT, just a few hours after the security breach took place, adding, “We all feel terrible this happened.”
The Twitter boss said his team is now trying to establish precisely how it occurred, and promised to “share everything we can” once the investigating team has more information.
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.
— jack (@jack) July 16, 2020
Dozens of high-profile accounts were hit in the scam, with each one posting a message that offered to pay a sender double any payment they made to a Bitcoin wallet address included in the tweet. According to Blockchain.com data, more than $100,000 had been sent to the Bitcoin wallet via more than 370 transactions as of early Wednesday evening.
Former President Barack Obama and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, were among the hacked accounts. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, entertainer Kanye West, and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg were also targeted, as were tech firms such as Apple and Uber.
After Twitter noticed the hack, it temporarily halted the ability for verified accounts to tweet until it could be sure it was on top of the situation. Operations have now returned to normal.
In the meantime, Twitter is trying to work out how the hack took place so that it can stop it from happening again. We’ve reached out to the company for more information and will update this piece when we hear back.
