The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and officials in the State of New York reportedly initiated probes into a hack which resulted in more than 130 Twitter accounts being hijacked.

An FBI representative told Financial Times (FT) it started an investigation into the attack, which related to a cryptocurrency fraud.

The Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo also ordered an examination of the hack, which he described as “deeply troubling” as it raised concerns over cybersecurity, the media outlet said.

On Wednesday (15 July) a number of Twitter accounts fell victim to a series of piracy attacks, resulting in posts urging people to make contributions to the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, BBC News reported.

Among compromised accounts were those of prominent individuals, including former US President Barack Obama, Elon Musk and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the media outlet said.

“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 explained.

The company said it found no evidence of attackers obtaining user passwords and pledged to continue investigating, while “taking aggressive steps to secure our systems”.

In February, the Twitter accounts of Facebook and its messaging app Messenger were hacked through a third-party platform.