Mr. Robot Star Jokingly Takes Blame for Twitter Hack

The social media platform Twitter was plagued with problems this afternoon as a swath of verified accounts found themselves the targets of a major spam hack. Celebrities and public figures like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Kanye West, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and many more found themselves the victims of an attack by cryptocurrency scammers. Each of the accounts for these figures, along with the likes of Apple and Mike Bloomberg, sent out a message offering to double any Bitcoin payment sent to their addresses. Though no one has publicly claimed responsibility, one actress threw her hat in the ring as a potential suspect.

Mr. Robot star Carly Chaikin chimed in after Twitter allowed verified accounts to tweet again, simply writing “It was me.” For those unaware, Chaikin and her co-star Rami Malek starred as hacktivist siblings in the Sam Esmail created USA Network series. Working under the banner of “fsociety” the series saw them work to dismantle a major corporation, redistribute wealth, and expose the top 1% of the top 1% that pull the strings of the world.

The series concluded its fourth and final season last year and could rack up a few Emmy nominations since the curtains have closed. Malek won the Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series Primetime Emmy for the first season of the series which has gone on to be nomianted for at least three Emmys for each of its seasons.

In a series of messages about their investigation into the hack, Twitter Support wrote: “Our investigation is still ongoing but here’s what we know so far: 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.”

Though Chaikin’s comment was made in jest, “coordinated social engineering attacks” were a hallmark of how fsociety operated in Mr. Robot.

Due to the nature of the hack and to prevent further spread, Twitter blocked all verified accounts from posting to prevent any further disruption and to reduce risk.

“Most functionality has been restored but we may take further actions and will update you if we do,” they added. “We have locked accounts that were compromised and will restore access to the original account owner only when we are certain we can do so securely.”