Twitter Account Hacked like Biden, Obama, Elon Musk, Bill Gates in Bitcoin scam

Multiple High Profiles account were hacked on Wednesday

Multiple high-profile Twitter accounts were hijacked on Wednesday, with some of the platform's top voices - including US presidential candidate Joe Biden, reality TV star Kim Kardashian, former US President Barack Obama and billionaire Elon Musk, among many others - used to solicit digital currency.

Hours after the first wave of hacks, the cause of the breach had not yet been made public. In a sign of the seriousness of the problem, Twitter took the extraordinary step of preventing at least some verified accounts from publishing messages altogether.

It was not clear whether all verified users were affected but, if they were, it would have a huge impact on the platform and its users. Verified users include celebrities, journalists, and news agencies as well as governments, politicians, heads of state and emergency services.

Most of those users had their ability to tweet restored hours later, Twitter said in a statement, although it cautioned account functionality "may come and go" as it continued to work on a solution.

Chief Executive Jack Dorsey said the company was diagnosing the problem and pledged to share "everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened."

"Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened," he said in a tweet.

Security Breach

Some experts said it seemed probable that hackers had access to Twitter's internal infrastructure.

"It is highly likely that the attackers were able to hack into the back end or service layer of the Twitter application," said Michael Borohovski, director of software engineering at security company Synopsys.

"If the hackers do have access to the backend of Twitter, or direct database access, there is nothing potentially stopping them from pilfering data in addition to using this tweet-scam as a distraction," he said.