Earlier today, a lot of Twitter accounts got hacked including famous personalities. The social media giant is currently investigating the issue.
It looks like Twitter is exerting more efforts in enhancing their security as high profile accounts were hacked today. Pop Crave was able to screenshot the tweets before they got deleted.
Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, Uber, Apple and other high profile accounts were hacked by Bitcoin scammers. pic.twitter.com/9WAtTjFJMj
— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) July 15, 2020
Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Kanye West, and Jeff Bezos were among the famous personalities that got hacked.
In addition, the scam tweets were also done by either a group of bitcoin scammers or an individual, judging from the posted identical bitcoin wallet address.
Bitcoin scamming through social engineering
However, the social media hack did not limit to famous celebrities alone as other big companies such as Uber also got caught in the hack.
Like many others, our @Uber account was hit by a scammer today. The tweet has been deleted and we're working directly with @Twitter to figure out what happened.
— Uber Comms (@Uber_Comms) July 15, 2020
Even the crypto community was also affected as Gemini CEO Tyler Winklevoss also blasted out a tweet of a lot of exchanges being exploited as well.
WARNING: @Gemini's twitter account, along with a number of other crypto twitter accounts, has been hacked. This has resulted in @Gemini, @Coinbase, @Binance, and @Coindesk, tweeting about a scam partnership with CryptoForHealth. DO NOT CLICK THE LINK! These tweets are SCAMS.
— Tyler Winklevoss (@tyler) July 15, 2020
BBC News also reported that Apple was also included in the targeted hack. In addition, password reset requests were also being denied.
The attack all boils down to one major bitcoin scam and sadly some got baited and actually sent money to the posted address.
Looking into a public record of transactions related to the scam, it was able to receive over US$118,000 [AU$168,000] worth of bitcoin.
However, it looks like the damage has already been done and Mike Chapple, a former National Security Agency (NSA) computer scientist said in an interview, as per NPR:
“The way that cryptocurrency works, once a transfer takes place, it is irreversible and virtually untraceable […] The real question here is how the attackers gained access to these prominent Twitter accounts in the first place.”
Twitter locks out all affected accounts
CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted out that it’s a “tough day” for them at Twitter and they feel terrible that this incident happened.
Later on, their support account said a coordinated social engineering attack on its employees was the root cause of the hack.
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.
— Support (@Support) July 16, 2020
For the user’s safety, Twitter has also decided to temporarily lock the affected accounts until they have a clearer picture of what is going on.
Justin Fier of Darktrace tells CNBC’s Squawk Box Asia that he is predicting that attacks such as this one will become “a new norm” in the next few months.
The U.S. elections are also nearing and this isn’t the first time that misinformation spread on Twitter. This year, President Donald Trump was also called out by Twitter because of violating their guidelines.
Fier also advises the viewers to take Twitter’s advice and change your passwords and apply 2-factor authentication. In this day and age, users need to be careful and continue to remain vigilant on scams.
Featured image courtesy of Darwin Laganzon/Pixabay