Twitter has revealed that 130 accounts were targeted in a cyber attack this week in which the profiles of prominent users including Barack Obama, Elon Musk and Kim Kardashian were hijacked with demands for Bitcoin payments.

The attack, which took place on Wednesday, is being investigated by the FBI as a cryptocurrency fraud after accounts including Kanye West, Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and investor Warren Buffet were compromised. Corporate accounts for Uber and Apple were also targeted.

A Tweet sent from Gates’ account said “Everyone is asking me to give back. You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000.”

In a statement on Thursday evening, Twitter posted a statement explaining that approximately 130 accounts were targeted by the attackers as part of the incident, and that a “small subset” of the accounts were hijacked to send Tweets.

The statement added that the social media company was working with impacted account owners and said they continued to assess whether “non-public data related to these accounts was compromised.”

The social media company added: “We have also been taking aggressive steps to secure our systems while our investigations are ongoing. We’re still in the process of assessing longer-term steps that we may take and will share more details as soon as we can.”

Responding to the incident, the UK National Cyber Security Centre said it had “reached out” to Twitter.
“While this appears to be an attack on the company rather than individual users, we would urge people to treat requests for money or sensitive information on social media with extreme caution”, the NCSC said.

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