On Wednesday, con artists hacked into the Twitter accounts of so many high-profiled individuals which include technology moguls, politicians, and major companies in an apparent bitcoin scam.
The ruse included tweets from Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg, and a number of tech billionaires including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The fake tweets offered to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to a bitcoin address.
The cause of the breach was not immediately clear, but the scale and the scope of the problem suggested that it was not limited to a single account or service.
The hacks appeared to focus on cryptocurrency-focused accounts. In an initial wave of scam posts, @bitcoin, @ripple, @coindesk, @coinbase, and @binance were hacked with the same message: “We have partnered with CryptoForHealth and are giving back 5000 BTC to the community,” followed by a link to a website.
Twitter first acknowledged the situation at 2:45 p.m. PT Wednesday afternoon, referring to it as a “security incident,” while subsequently, Twitter said in an email that it was looking into the matter and would issue a statement shortly. They later tweeted that people might not be able to change their passwords.
According to Aljazeera, Some experts said it seemed probable that hackers had access to Twitter’s internal infrastructure. Michael Borohovski, director of software engineering at security company Synopsys said:
It is highly likely that the attackers were able to hack into the back end or service layer of the Twitter application. If the hackers do have access to the backend of Twitter, or direct database access, there is nothing potentially stopping them from pilfering data in addition to using this tweet-scam as a distraction.
Publicly available blockchain records show that the apparent scammers have already received more than $100,000 worth of cryptocurrency.
The hack has raised so many questions about Twitter’s cybersecurity with many suggesting the company (Twitter) is not doing enough to protect itself, hence, the recent attack might give way to many others.
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