Yesterday’s Twitter hack was pretty incredible. Nick Statt, with the high-level at The Verge:

The Twitter accounts of major companies and individuals have been compromised in one of the most widespread and confounding hacks the platform has ever seen, all in service of promoting a bitcoin scam that appears to be earning its creators quite a bit of money.

We don’t know how the hack happened or even to what extent Twitter’s own systems may have been compromised — but following the unprecedented hacks of accounts including President Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Michael Bloomberg, and Apple, Twitter has confirmed it took the drastic step of blocking new tweets from every verified user, compromised or no, as well as locking all compromised accounts.

According to @TwitterSupport:

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.

We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf. We’re looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed and will share more here as we have it.

If you’re going to pull off a hack of this magnitude, why waste it on a bogus scheme to make some Bitcoin? Let’s be thankful this wasn’t some crazy election night attack that resulted in a real problem. It looks like the hackers made off with around $116k. Compared to the number of very influential people that were hacked, this hardly seems worth the effort. Let’s hope Twitter has this buttoned up quickly and it can’t be done again.