High-profile Twitter users targeted in major hack

Twitter is investigating a massive hack in which high-profile users from Elon Musk to Joe Biden had their accounts hijacked by scammers, who the social network believes targeted its employees to gain access to internal systems.

Posts trying to dupe people into sending hackers the virtual currency Bitcoin were tweeted by the official accounts of Apple, Uber, Kanye West, Bill Gates, Barack Obama and many others on Wednesday.

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"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," Twitter said.

"They used this access to take control of many highly-visible... accounts," the company said, adding that it was investigating "what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed."

The fraudulent posts, which were largely deleted, said people had 30 minutes to send $1,000 in the cryptocurrency, promising they would receive twice as much in return.

A total of 12.58 bitcoins -- worth almost $116,000 -- were sent to email addresses mentioned in the tweets, according to the site Blockchain.com, which monitors crypto transactions.

"Tough day for us at Twitter," chief executive Jack Dorsey said in a tweet.

"We all feel terrible this happened. We're diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened."

Twitter said it had locked down the affected accounts and removed the tweets posted by the hackers. "

Vice reported that a Twitter insider was responsible, citing leaked screenshots and two anonymous sources apparently behind the hack, one of whom told the media outlet they had paid the employee.