On July 15, the most prominent personal twitter accounts of famous users, crypto exchanges, and tech companies simultaneously hacked by scammers to steer followers to send crypto.
The dozens of the biggest names including Joseph R. Biden Jr., Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Kanye West, and Elon Musk posted similar messages on Twitter: Send Bitcoin and the famous people would send back double your money.
Many of the scam tweets were quickly removed by twitter, but some accounts sent similar tweets again, suggesting that Twitter was powerless for regaining control.
Twitter’s chief executive 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.”
This twitter hack made the users send Bitcoin to the Bitcoin wallets promoted in the tweets. The wallets had received over $100k worth of Bitcoin from over 300 transactions, according to the website that tracks the Bitcoin public ledger.
The hackers were asking only for the Bitcoin, they didn’t use their access to aim at any important institutions or infrastructure. Officials noted that the breach didn’t affect the account of President Trump. His account was now under special security.
Twitter has also fallen victim to breaches on Mr.Dorsey’s account in August 2019, hackers transferred his phone number to a new Sim card which stores a phone’s number, which is called SIM-swapping, allowing the hackers to tweet from his account. In 2017, a rogue worker used their access to Twitter’s systems to briefly delete President Trump’s Twitter account. The account was restored within minutes.
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