Twitter accounts of celebrities, major corporate company accounts, and famous politicians were compromised in one of the biggest Twitter hacks in history. As per Twitter, the hackers managed to access to the company’s internal systems and tools.
In a major Twitter hack on Wednesday, July 15, accounts of several high-profile individuals, companies and crypto exchanges were compromised. Official accounts of famous personalities like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Elon Musk and others were victim to the broadly targeted hack.
Apart from these, official corporate Twitter handles of companies like Uber, Apple, Coinbase, Binance, and CoinDesk were also compromised. However, all the accounts had a common pattern in the tweet posted by the hackers. All the compromised accounts posted a message with a Bitcoin wallet address for making the payment. The tweet also referred that the celebrities would pay double the payments against individual contributions as part of COVID-19.
In an immediate response coming by Wednesday evening, Gemini CEO Tyler Winklevoss warned his followers. He wrote: “DO NOT CLICK THE LINK! These tweets are SCAMS.”
This is a SCAM, DO NOT participate! This is the same attack/takeover that other major crypto twitter accounts are experiencing. Be vigilant! Situation is ongoing.https://t.co/2k9U3PpnKm
— Cameron Winklevoss (@cameron) July 15, 2020
Winklevoss also informed that the hackers had a scam partnership with a group dubbed CryptoForHealth. As a warning message to Twitter users, people are now tweeting with #CryptoForHealth asking other users to not fall for the scam.
Crypto Scammers Managed to Dodge Twitter Employees
Later on Wednesday, Twitter announced that the hackers targeted Twitter employees to get access to all of Twitter’s internal tools and systems. The Twitter support wrote:
“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.”
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also tweeted about the incident later that day.
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.
💙 to our teammates working hard to make this right.
— jack (@jack) July 16, 2020
Some of the other high-profile names included names of Democratic Party’s Presidential candidate Joe Biden and New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg. This was reportedly the biggest-ever hack and compromise on Twitter. Speaking to CNBC news, Rachel Tobac, the CEO of cybersecurity firm SocialProof Security, said:
“We are lucky the attackers are going after bitcoin (money motivated) and not motivated by chaos and destruction.”
Former White House chief information officer Teresa Payton has asked Twitter to provide complete details of Wednesday’s incident. As per Payton, there’s also a high chance that personal messages were stolen from the compromised accounts. Speaking to CNBC, Payton noted:
“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.”
In a series of tweets, the company also assured that they are working to get this through. Besides, Twitter has asked people to reset their passwords.
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