Several prominent Twitter accounts, including those of former US president Barack Obama, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, were hacked apparently to promote a Bitcoin scam in what the microblogging site believes to be a "coordinated social engineering attack." The account of former US vice-president Joe Biden, who is the current Democratic Party presidential candidate in the November election, was also hacked.

"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's support team said on Wednesday. The attackers posted tweets that appeared to promote a cryptocurrency scam. The fake tweets offered to send USD 2,000 for every USD 1,000 sent to an anonymous Bitcoin address.