The Twitter account of OpenAI's Chief Technology Officer appears to have been hacked on Thursday evening in order to promote a fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme. Mira Murati, who has worked at OpenAI for over five years, lost control of her Twitter account around 6.03 p.m. Pacific Time (as per timestamps on the tweets), reports VentureBeat.

Later, her account started promoting a new cryptocurrency called "$OPENAI" that was allegedly "driven by artificial intelligence-based language models". In the unauthorised tweets, Murati's followers were encouraged to send money to an Ethereum digital wallet address in order to receive free "airdropped" coins.

The tweets were quickly deleted before reappearing minutes later with slightly altered wording, according to the report. Murati's account had the tweets up for more than 45 minutes. Her account was restored to its original state, and the tweets were removed.

The apparent hack of Murati's account comes four months after Twitter modified its two-factor authentication policies, removing SMS text messaging as a way to secure accounts unless users subscribe to Twitter Blue. The report said that security experts have expressed concern that the changes may make high-profile accounts more vulnerable to takeovers.

She does have a blue checkmark on her Twitter profile, indicating that she subscribes to Twitter Blue and can use SMS two-factor authentication.