The United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation has launched a probe into the widespread hack of Twitter Inc, according to reports.

The US agency is investigating what was one of the biggest cybersecurity breaches on the social media platform, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Earlier on Thursday, hackers had gained access to multiple high-profile accounts, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Uber and Apple.

Prior to that, multiple accounts related to cryptocurrency had also been hacked. Hackers had posted tweets aimed at scamming people out of bitcoins. One such example is: “Feeling greatful” (sic), “doubling all payments made to my Bitcoin address”, urging people to pay out $1,000 and get $2,000 back.”

The hack was part of an alleged cryptocurrency scam where hackers have amassed bitcoins worth over $1 lakh.

US lawmakers had expressed their concerns over the hack questioning the security measures taken by the platform.

“Imagine if the bad actors that hacked Twitter had a different intent, to use powerful voices to spread disinformation to interfere with our elections or disrupt the stock market. We need strong cybersecurity standards to protect Americans from scams and misinformation,” tweeted US Senator Ed Markey.

Twitter had said that it had locked the compromised accounts and was investigating the matter. The company believes the hackers had targeted employees with access to internal systems and tools.

“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 had said.

“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,” it added.

The FBI said that “at this time, the accounts appear to have been compromised in order to perpetuate cryptocurrency fraud,” as quoted by WSJ . The social media giant was complying with the investigation, as per the report.

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