The Twitter timebomb: Experts warn hackers could swing elections, stock market and potentially start a WAR after Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Elon Musk accounts were hijacked in 'biggest ever' security breach

 

The Twitter security breach that allowed hackers to hijack the accounts of billionaires, politicians, celebrities and companies has sparked fears they could have wreaked havoc on the stock market, meddled in elections or even potentially started a war.     

Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk were among the victims of the four-hour attack on Wednesday that saw hackers infiltrate Twitter's internal systems and post bogus tweets from the high profile accounts asking people to send Bitcoin.

Publicly available blockchain records show that the scammers received more than $116,000 worth of cryptocurrency, which equates to 12.8 bitcoin, from over 300 people over the four-hour stretch. 

Twitter, whose stocks slumped 2.5 percent on Thursday following the embarrassing hack, has said the hackers targeted its staff amid claims that an employee was bribed to grant access to the internal systems.   

 

In an extraordinary step, Twitter stopped all verified accounts from tweeting or resetting their passwords for several hours as the social media giant struggled to address the security breach. 

It is not clear if the high profile names that were target lost full control of their accounts but they were able to start tweeting again late Wednesday night. 

While the hack is thought to be one of the largest in history, experts have warned that Twitter was 'extremely lucky' that the hackers appeared to only be after money and that it 'could have been worse'.