Twitter Hackers Seek Bitcoin Donations By Hacking Accounts of Famous Personalit

[ValerieChristaldi]

In one of the biggest hacks in the history of Twitter, hackers on Wednesday managed to get access to some high-profile Twitter accounts which include some of the famous business personalities, corporate accounts, and accounts of other politicians.

Official accounts of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Warren Buffett were completely compromised. The hackers asked millions of followers to send Bitcoins to a specific Bitcoin wallet address. It was the good old Ponzi scheme of sending back double the amount as part of a community giveaway and contribution.

Not only individual accounts, but corporate accounts of companies like Apple, Uber, Coinbase and other crypto exchanges were also at the receiving end.

Twitter quickly took cognizance of this matter and initiated an investigation. The company said that hackers targeted twitter employees in order to get complete access to the company’s tools and systems.

This turns out to be one of the biggest data breaches and data compromise in the history of tech industry. The official support handle of Twitter reported: “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. We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf.”

Speaking about this unfortunate incident, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said: “Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened. We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened”.

Theresa Payton, a former White House chief information officer said that she expects Twitter to provide complete details of the event about why and how these accounts were compromised. She also warned that direct messages from all these accounts would have been stolen and released in the future for malicious use.

Speaking to CNBC, Payton said: “They’re going to need to apologize to the VIPs and to the individuals who were defrauded and fell for the scam. The next thing they’re going to need to do is to conduct a thorough and transparent investigation, and they’re going to need to share what they can about who the attackers were and how they pulled this off.”

Gemini's CEO, Tyler Winklevoss, said that the accounts have also tweeted about a scam partnership with a group dubbed CryptoForHealth. The hacked tweets also encourage other crypto groups that celebrities are donating Bitcoin to the community healthcare partners.

Winklevoss told his followers: "DO NOT CLICK THE LINK! These tweets are SCAMS.”

Most of the social media platforms including Twitter has long-back banned any cryptocurrency promotions from their platforms. Incidents like these continue to bring a bad image to the entire crypto industry.

Source: https://www.worldcoinindex.com/news/twitter-hackers-seek-bitcoin-donations-by-hacking-accounts-of-famous-personalities-businesses-and-politicians

[adAmgene]

"Official accounts of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Warren Buffett were completely compromised. The hackers asked millions of followers to send Bitcoins to a specific Bitcoin wallet address. It was the good old Ponzi scheme of sending back double the amount as part of a community giveaway and contribution." The world is going crazy, 2020 year has really bad start. What is next??

[Kakmakr]

A similar scam are being operated on Youtube too, where celebrity are linked to massive giveaways that do not exist. They know these people are loaded and they have enough money to fund giveaways, so they target their accounts. They also know if a high profile celebrity endorse a giveaway, it legitimized the project, so they win people's trust that way.

The lesson to be learnt from this is as follows : DO NOT send anyone Crypto currencies to receive more Crypto currencies, because it is most likely a scam. These people will not ask for money to send you money, no matter who they are. Fools are easily parted with their wealth, when greed clouds their judgement. 

[Gotumoot]

It seems hard to believe but how did all the high profile account been hacked all at the same time?
I hope that tweeter would soon give out a statement about this event and hope that there wouldn't be a virus or malware on the link that has been posted.
There are so many people who would fall to it since they are all trusted profiles just like what I stated before I hope that there wouldn't be so much casualties on this event.

[CaVO32]

It seems hard to believe but how did all the high profile account been hacked all at the same time?
I hope that tweeter would soon give out a statement about this event and hope that there wouldn't be a virus or malware on the link that has been posted.
There are so many people who would fall to it since they are all trusted profiles just like what I stated before I hope that there wouldn't be so much casualties on this event.

We will see in the next coming months what will be the aftermath of this unfortunate incident in this social media. Now, that people are aware of this incident, they should know how to attack possible approach of these scammers to extort something to them. I wonder what will be the action of those popular personalities regarding their hacked accounts?

[abel1337]

It seems hard to believe but how did all the high profile account been hacked all at the same time?
I hope that tweeter would soon give out a statement about this event and hope that there wouldn't be a virus or malware on the link that has been posted.
There are so many people who would fall to it since they are all trusted profiles just like what I stated before I hope that there wouldn't be so much casualties on this event.

I think this is all planed by the hacker releasing the same statement  which is "asking people to send them bitcoin using the hacked accounts" at the same, Using the same method many times in illegal things is proven not effective that's why posting it at the same time will be more effective.

Twitter also released their statement regarding this issue

Read it here: https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/15/21326656/twitter-hack-explanation-bitcoin-accounts-employee-tools

[Welsh]

The annoying part about this, is we will start to see the media spin this off in a negative light on Bitcoin, and the Bitcoin community completely ignoring the fact that crime, and ransoms happen with fiat currencies too.

As for the statement from Twitter; I'm wondering how this was done exactly, assuming that the tools are only available to accounts which are of efficient privilege, was a staff users account compromised, and then they proceeded to attack specific targets such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Jeff Besos. Those are people who I would consider to be involved in similar fields, and is definitely a orchestrated attack to try, and get as much money as possible from the attempt knowing that this would have been shut down fairly quickly.

Twitter might want to consider having staff actions peer reviewed by other staff users to prevent unauthorized action. Although, it would increase the work of the staff users, Twitter certainly has the resources to do something like that.

Update: It does seem that this was a compromise at a wider scale than I initially expected, but details on how it happened are lacking at the time being.

[Coin_trader]

It seems hard to believe but how did all the high profile account been hacked all at the same time?
I hope that tweeter would soon give out a statement about this event and hope that there wouldn't be a virus or malware on the link that has been posted.
There are so many people who would fall to it since they are all trusted profiles just like what I stated before I hope that there wouldn't be so much casualties on this event.

We will see in the next coming months what will be the aftermath of this unfortunate incident in this social media. Now, that people are aware of this incident, they should know how to attack possible approach of these scammers to extort something to them. I wonder what will be the action of those popular personalities regarding their hacked accounts?

Uninstall twitter and used decentralized social media platform instead? This hacking scenario will never stop until this social media giant company like Facebook and twitter will choose the decentralisation path. They can't guarantee that all there personnel will not leak info about there security.

I believe all this misfortune will backfire to twitter company itself because they let hacker breach there security system. Those verified account have a special security system that's why I'm still confused how the hacker access multiple account at the same time.

[DoubleEdgeEX]

It´s truly remarkable that people in 2020 are still so naive and gullible to believe in such an obvious scam. At least it´s a good promotion for #bitcoin since the mistake is clearly on Twitters side.

What makes me wonder though, why didn´t the hackers use Craig Wrights account to promote the scam? Would fit imho haha

[Oceat]

It´s truly remarkable that people in 2020 are still so naive and gullible to believe in such an obvious scam. At least it´s a good promotion for #bitcoin since the mistake is clearly on Twitters side.

What makes me wonder though, why didn´t the hackers use Craig Wrights account to promote the scam? Would fit imho haha

Lol.

Scammers wouldn't bother to use his name/account though, he's a complete fraud and that's not how scammers think. They clearly want to market something that would be easily flooded with greedy newbies that's why using something like hacking or what kind of BS they might think is a complete fraud. Most of these scammers are trying to blend in to the recent/past events so they could easily manipulate those newbies.

[ReiMomo]

~snip~
What makes me wonder though, why didn´t the hackers use Craig Wrights account to promote the scam? Would fit imho haha

Lol.
I don't know if there was who believed since the followers of Craig Wrights was also his side, hackers I guess maybe have slim of chances to convince people since CW is the founder of BSV, unless, if the tweet says, send BSV and we will double the amount you've sent. 

The most I worried is social media news they put negative side on bitcoin, I guess there will be an effect to the new bitcoin invetors to have a fear in investing bitcoin. But let's do hope that will might not happen.

[pixie85]

They were doing similar things for many years, hacking FB and twitter accounts of various crypto companies and saying they're running a giveaway and all you have to dop is deposit $10 in crypto to take part in it and get more back. One of the oldest tricks in the book.

The only thing that annoys me is not that they hacked the accounts because that's on Twitter and their bad security but that they will now make money of this. People should know better and not send them money but they will because people are greedy.

[Phantomberry]

Mostly hackers now are genius they are innovative I was amused of intelligence of a hacker that people will never forget it the "Biggest Hack in Twitter's History". I feel sad to twitter that their security is not much secured as a hacker invade their system. I wish it will lesson learned to everyone that social media has a big impact on our personality in some ways and Also, we should expect the fact that people's perspective of bitcoin is a scam and we never can be denied on it because of this scam happening.