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- On Wednesday, 15th July, many renowned high profile Twitter accounts hacked involving a Bitcoin scam.
- Barack Obama, Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk, Bill Gates, etc. were the few victims of this hack.
- To investigate this issue, Twitter has blocked all verified accounts from posting or even changing their passwords.
On Wednesday, 15th July, many renowned high profile Twitter accounts hacked involving a Bitcoin scam. The scammers have been able to make a whopping $109,000 so far. Former President Barack Obama, Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk, Bill Gates, etc. were the few victims of this heart-stopping hack. To investigate this issue, Twitter has blocked all verified accounts from posting or even changing their passwords.
Minutiae of the Twitter hacks
The scam was initiated at around 3 pm ET. The scammers took control over the accounts of Cryptocurrency giants, including Binance and Coinbase. The hackers advocated fraudulent health websites using the prominent high profile accounts and promised to send Bitcoins as rewards to those who would contribute to it.
As of 6 pm ET on Wednesday, there was a broadcast from hackers on the Bitcoin address. It stated that they had collected under 12 Bitcoins or so, which amounts to $109,000 on current prices.
The investigation is going on; however, it is very ambiguous as to who is behind these hacks. According to sources, a Twitter employee was responsible for these hacks. The accounts were reportedly taken over using a tool only at the disposal of Twitter employees. Following this, several screenshots have floated up, and one of them shows the panel and account of Binance. Investigators believe that at least some accounts were infiltrated by altering the email address associated with them using the tool.
Notions set by hacks among the Masses
Following these hacks, many people have also expressed their views via tweets. One such Tweet states that these hackers have done more marketing for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency as a whole compared to the Twitter influencers.
These hackers have done more for Bitcoin marketing then all you Twitter influencers combined.
— Cøbra (@CobraBitcoin) July 15, 2020
The masses believe that marketing through scams have negative connotations at all times and may be harmful to Bitcoin. However, many also have conflicting opinions. Whereas, some others have raised questions regarding security concerns.
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
Twitter’s Tech team has also tweeted that they are fully aware of the hack and are working hard to find the culprits. They have also mentioned that they deleted the tweets from hackers once they were aware of the incident. Not only this, but the Tech team has also stated that they are looking for any other malicious activities caused by hackers.
