Twitterâs thin veil of security went into full meltdown at 19:00 UTC on Wednesday.
Within minutes, an apparently coordinated hack began: A mass takeover of the most prominent names in crypto. Within hours, even Barack Obamaâs account was compromised.
Click here for CoinDeskâs full coverage of the Twitter hack.
The messages pumped a bitcoin giveaway scam associated with an organization called âCrypto For Health.â
First, they came for Binanceâs account. Gemini was next. Then Coinbase. CoinDesk. Justin Sun. Charlie Lee. Bitcoin.org. Kucoin. Bitfinex. The Tron Foundation. Ripple.
Millions of collective followers began seeing the same, cloying message: âI am giving back to my fans. All Bitcoin sent to my address below will be sent back doubled.â
About one hour in, the hack ditched its âCrypto For Healthâ tagline and went mainstream. Elon Muskâs account led the charge. Then Bill Gates. Then Elon Muskâs account came back for more. Kanye showed up an hour later. Jeff Bezos promised $50 million. Michael Bloomberg. Joe Biden. Barack Obama.
âIâm feeling generous because of Covid-19. Iâll double any BTC payment sent to my BTC address for the next hour. Good luck, and stay safe out there!â Muskâs account tweeted out. That post, like many of them, has since been deleted. (The hacker returned to Muskâs account for a second (and third) round, however.)
Read More:Â Obama, Biden, Netanyahu, Musk: Hereâs a List of Every Hacked Twitter AccountÂ
By 21:00 UTC the hack had moved on to the tech giants. Appleâs account promised to double your bitcoin. Uberâs said it would return $10 million to users.
Hackers all linked to or directly promoted a single bitcoin wallet address. Some fell for it. By press time the wallet had received 11.5 BTC worth $106,200 and sent out 5.8 BTC worth $53,600 in 278 transactions.Â
The hacked accounts collectively had at least 139.6 million followers.Â
What was so perplexing about this hack was that some of these accounts had two-factor authentication. At least CoinDeskâs did.
With no easy explanation for how a single hack could target so many prominent Twitter accounts from such a broad spectrum â technology, entertainment, philanthropy, politics â Twitter users began to grasp for rumors. In the end, crypto was just once again ahead of the curve.
As news of the hack began to creep into the mainstream media, Twitterâs stock plunged 4% in after-hours trading.
This is a developing story.