Yesterday, Twitter was compromised in one of the most widespread and confounding hacks it has ever experienced. Numerous ultra high profile accounts were targeted, including President Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Michael Bloomberg, and Apple.

The hackers took over accounts in what appeared to be a Bitcoin scam, sending out tweets asking for money for which the “author” would send double back the amount. The hack resulted in people sending at least $120,000 worth of the cryptocurrency to the digital wallet address, which was listed in nearly all of the tweets. However, there may have been ulterior motives beyond the cryptocurrency scam – political and business accounts were made to look vulnerable and may have had sensitive account information exposed.

Twitter took drastic steps to block new tweets from every verified user, compromised or not, as well as locking all compromised accounts. Twitter tweeted, “We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools”. It was acknowledged that the hackers used special employee level access to take control of many highly visible and verified accounts. It has also been claimed that some employees were involved in helping hackers with access.

It is not confirmed exactly how the hack was carried out. But it is likely that as the hackers were able to take over multiple highly sensitive accounts, all with two-factor authentication enabled, that they could not have exploited this many individual accounts, but would have needed access to employee tools.

This attack shows how vulnerable social media can be. Twitter in particular has become a highly political platform, and accounts with this influence and reach being a risk may have further impact and risk, such as during elections. Shares in Twitter immediately fell 4 percent in after-hours trading.

Find Twitter’s instructions here on how to secure your own account: https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/two-factor-authentication