Twitter accounts of Obama, Gates, Biden hacked in Bitcoin scam

Washington, July 16: The Twitter accounts several prominent political and business leaders, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Bill Gates were hacked on Wednesday afternoon, in an attempt to promote a Bitcoin scam.

The attacks were coordinated in nature. The accounts of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Uber Technologies Inc., Apple Inc. and Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP, were also hacked.

The accounts sent out tweets promising to double the money of anyone sending funds via Bitcoin within 30 minutes.

As the hack unfold, verified Twitter accounts lost the ability to post new tweets."You may be unable to Tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident," Twitter wrote on its support account.

Twitter said that it is aware of the security incident impacting its accounts and is probing the incident. Some of the Twitter accounts that were targeted said they had used two factor authentication and strong passwords. These tweets however indicate that they were posting using Twitter's web application.