One American official called that a “scary possibility” in a world where national leaders, sometimes imitating Mr. Trump’s techniques, have adopted Twitter as a primary source of unfiltered communications. Mr. Stamos said that because the attackers had sent identical messages from the compromised accounts they were easy to detect and delete. But the attacks Wednesday were the first time that the real accounts of public figures were used in such a scam. Twitter initially handled the attacks by taking down the offending tweets. A spokesman for the Biden campaign said that Twitter had removed the tweet promoting the scam and locked down Mr. Biden’s account.

Source: New York Times July 15, 2020 21:35 UTC