On Wednesday, Twitter suffered a major breach where many accounts were hacked simultaneously. Twitter accounts of celebrities (verified accounts), which included : Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Wraen Buffet, Elon Musk, and many others were hacked. Corporate accounts of Uber and Apple were also targeted.
Attack resulted into cryptocurrency fraud
The attack resulted into major cryptocurrency fraud. Tweets from the hacked accounts assured to donate $2000 worth of bitcoins to whoever send to them bitcoins worth $1000. The accounts that were hacked had millions of followers. As a result, many people fell prey to the scam. It was later found that the hackers have collected cryptocurrency nearly worth $1,00,000.
It is likely to believe that the hackers had access to some internal system of Twitter, instead of hacking accounts individually, which allowed them to operate any account they want. In that case we were lucky that the hackers only conducted a bitcoin fraud. As they were potentially capable of doing anything they want with the data of Twitter. Michael Borohovski, director of software engineering at security company Synopsys, also suspect this bitcoin fraud to be a distraction for some bigger blunder caused by the hackers.
Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, said, “this was the worst hack of a major media platform yet.” CEOof BitTorrent Justin Sun put up a tweet announcing a reward of $1 million for the hackers.
Twitter confirmed to have amended the system by 20.30 ET. And the hacked accounts were safe to send tweets again. But it said it was still working on the tweet. Experts questioned Twitter’s cybersecurity system for such a blunder. “It’s clear the company is not doing enough to protect itself,” said Oren Falkowitz, former CEO of Area 1 Security.
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