Elon Musk and Bill Gates Are Not Giving Away Cryptocurrency — Twitter Has Been Hacked

Twitter has been hacked.

About an hour ago, thousands of accounts started tweeting out Bitcoin links. Some asked for people to donate money. Others had a more compelling message: Send money to this address, and I’ll double it and send it back. Most of them had a time limit (a mere 30 minutes) to encourage people to act without thinking.

Both Elon Musk and Bill Gates have had their accounts hacked, in addition to @Bitcoin, @CoinDesk, and a number of other cryptocurrency providers.

And people are falling for it.

So far, the linked address has received 6 bitcoin. At a price of $9,952, that’s over $50k in about half an hour. You can watch it yourself by going to Bitcoin Explorer.

The tweets by Elon Musk and Bill Gates have been deleted. After posting the tweet in question, Apple’s account went entirely blank.

But images of the tweets continue to circulate.

And there are a lot of other accounts out there.

Perhaps more importantly, it begs the question: How was Twitter the target of such a widespread hack?

As all security professionals know, the greatest harm comes from within. It’s been posited that the Twitter administrative panel was actually hacked, and that the panel makes it possible to change email addresses and passwords.

(In the past 10 minutes, the account has gone from 6 btc to 11 btc, and still climbing.)

But that’s really just speculation. If it’s true, it’s a massive security flaw. That being said, the entirety of the event already implies a massive security flaw, wherever it lies.

The unfortunate truth is that if it does have something to do with the administrative panel, there’s nothing you can do personally to secure your accounts. Bill Gates and Elon Musk would have had 2FA on. While changing your passwords and turning on 2FA now is a good general security practice, it does nothing if there’s an administrative way to subvert it.

For now, everyone is waiting on a remark from Twitter itself — and its sardonic brand account has not yet made a statement.