High-profile Twitter accounts, including those of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and others, were taken over in a wave of hackings on Wednesday (July 15), according to CNBC.
On Musk’s account, a tweet appeared asking for bitcoin, promising to double all payments sent to an address.
That tweet was deleted moments later, and a second one appeared right after that, which was also deleted. There were three tweets sent in total, in addition to a reply to Microsoft Founder Bill Gates, CNBC wrote.
A tweet from Apple (its first-ever tweet) and another from Bezos were similar to Musk’s, promising to double payments in bitcoin for anyone visiting an address posted.
Gemini Co-Founder Cameron Winklevoss tweeted out an explanation: “ALL MAJOR CRYPTO TWITTER ACCOUNTS HAVE BEEN COMPROMISED,” CNBC reported.
Cyberattacks, already common in pre-pandemic times, have skyrocketed in the last few months, including attacks on hospitals, PYMNTS reported. The attacks have come at over 80 percent of medical practices, and over half of them said there had been safety concerns. Twenty percent of them had to go down for around five hours or more. Wendi Whitmore, vice president of IBM X-Force, said that could be “the difference between life and death.”
IBM reported a 6,000 percent spike in cyberattacks over the initial pandemic period from March to April. At Seattle Children’s Hospital, the amount of attacks doubled, involving phishing emails with malicious links allowing hacking to occur.
As the pandemic has seen people’s spending habits shift largely to the internet’s digital technologies, scammers and fraudsters have followed, seizing on the opportunities from confusion and haste as companies and individuals transitioned to the new mode of spending. Google, in late May, reported a resurgence of hacking and phishing incidents.
Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) identified more than a dozen government-backed “hack-for-hire” firms attacking healthcare and finance firms in the past few months.