Bitcoin. Say that word and those friends who’ve come into contact with your one acquaintance who doesn’t shut up about how smart he is for investing early, quake with fear (and annoyance). Yet when Bitcoin extends beyond that annoyance to full blown security threat? Well, that’s enough to get everyone shivering with terror.
Such is the case with a huge attack on Twitter which took place last night, compromising some really large and influential Twitter accounts in a bid to promote some kind of bitcoin scam. Twitter took drastic measures to stifle the hack but, at this point, the fact that something like this happened across the social media platform is scary enough.
You’re all invited
The hack, which saw both verified and unverified Twitter accounts punting the bitcoin scam, caused quite a panic for Twitter, resulting in blanket ban on thousands of accounts to prevent the scam spreading any further. Accounts affected include Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Apple and even Kanye West. “We have locked accounts that were compromised and will restore access to the original account owner only when we are certain we can do so securely”, reads a tweet published by the official Twitter account of…Twitter.
Most accounts should be able to Tweet again. As we continue working on a fix, this functionality may come and go. We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.
— Support (@Support) July 16, 2020
It’s a massive breach, consisting of potentially millions of Twitter accounts. Despite looking into the issue, Twitter has been unable to figure where the hack originated, how it was conducted or who was behind the incident. All we know was that the debacle started when Elon Musk’s Twitter account started tweeting out links to a bitcoin scam which included a bitcoin wallet address.
Bill Gate’s Twitter account followed, tweeting identical content with the same wallet address. Despite posts being reported as spam and deleted, more kept coming, spreading to more accounts. This was enough for Twitter to drop the hammer and disable tweets from all verified accounts. At the time of writing, most verified accounts will have regained the ability to tweet while Twitter continues to look into the problem.
Any takers?
The scam relied on people sending money to the bitcoin wallet address with the promise of their “investment” being doubled and returned. Which is super dumb because why would people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates require people to pay $1000 only to give away $2000? Still, that’s how scams function.
In a tweet from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s account, he wrote, “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. (Love) to our teammates working hard to make this right.”
We’ll keep you updated as to how this story proceeds.
(Source: The Verge)