Minutes later similar tweets went out from the accounts of other cryptocurrency exchanges, as well as from Twitter accounts of famous people, huge companies, billionaires, and presidents, current and past.
“Everyone is asking me to give back, and now is the time,” said a tweet that looked like it was coming from Bill Gates. There was a promise to double all payments to a Bitcoin address for the next 30 minutes.
During the hack and for 24 hours afterward the BTC wallet promoted by many of the hacked Twitter profiles processed 383 transactions and received almost 13 bitcoin, approximately $117,000.
Twitter support responded quickly to the hack
On Wednesday, as the hack was escalating, Twitter took the unprecedented step of blocking all verified accounts from tweeting as a temporary measure, while it secured its services.
It locked the affected accounts until their owners could satisfactorily identify themselves and take back control. Its data download feature was also temporarily disabled.
