Twitter was on fire on Wednesday after a security breach that hacked the accounts of prominent public figures including Barack Obama and Joe Biden flew into the public domain.
The incursion appears to be centered around a cryptocurrency scam. The tweets, which were fake, offered to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to a bitcoin address. The posts have been deleted but Euronews took screenshots of some of them.
We have masked the bitcoin code.
Twitter responded as news flew around the platform, sending the hashtag #twitterhacked to the top of the trending charts.
For a short while, verified accounts were unable to tweet. The platform then added more information.
In terms of the political targets, it was Democrats and other figures on the left that took the brunt of the scam. Inevitably this drew comparisons with US circles to the 2016 US presidential campaign. Biden’s current campaign team praised Twitter’s integrity team for locking down the account “within a few minutes of the breach.”