Scammers organized a large-scale attack on Twitter, hacking the accounts of many cryptocurrency companies, their leaders, as well as those ones of Elon Musk and Bill Gates. Criminals are trying to make money on fake bitcoin distribution.

Twitter accounts of crypto exchanges Coinbase, Binance, Gemini, Kucoin, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, Crypto•com wallet, Tron Foundation and its creator Justin Sun, Litecoin creator Charlie Lee, as well as IT enterpreneur Elon Musk and billionaire Bill Gates were hacked. Cybercriminals posted messages about fake distribution of 5,000 bitcoins. Traditionally, to receive a reward, one needs to send a small amount in cryptocurrency to the wallets indicated in the message.

In order to look more verisimilar, hackers chatted with each other from hacked accounts, confirming the veracity of the distribution campaign.

Given the massive nature of the hacks, criminals managed to find a vulnerability in the social network itself, in one of its servers, panels or Twitter API, or hacked the service for scheduling tweets.

Elon Musk's Twitter account was the first to be brought back under control, all fraudulent messages were deleted.

Although the leaders of the blockchain community and creators of crypto companies have repeatedly warned that they do not practice any distribution of coins and that such announcements are always scams, hackers managed to collect more than 11 BTC on one of the mentioned addresses, which is equivalent to almost $100,000.

Usually, organizers of such fake distributions do not hack existing Twitter accounts, but create their own accounts, similar to those of a famous person in the crypto world, changing one or more letters.

UPD: Hackers also got access to Twitter accounts of large companies owners and politicians. Among the victims of the latest hacking attack are billionaire Jeff Bezos and American politician, US presidential candidate Joe Biden, as well as official accounts of Apple, Uber and others.