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
