Hackers Got Into Twitter System & Made Several High-Profile Verified Users to Tweet Bitcoin Scam Tweets

Most of us would probably not even bother when we see a random unknown account tweet about asking for cryptocurrency.

Why? Because that’s definitely a scam. 

But would you say the same if you saw multiple high-profile users with verified accounts asking you to send them some cryptocurrency?

Some will say they won’t do it because it seems suspicious, but unfortunately, there are people who did.

Twitter Was Hacked

A number of high-profile Twitter accounts were hacked yesterday to solicit cryptocurrency.

These accounts include

• US presidential candidate Joe Biden;
• reality television show star Kim Kardashian;
• former US President Barack Obama;
• billionaire Elon Musk;
• rapper Kanye West;
• Amazon founder Jeff Bezos
• investor Warren Buffet
• Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates
• the corporate account of Uber;
• the corporate account of Apple;
• and several cryptocurrency-focused organisations.

Twitter wasn’t very sure of why there was a breach, and after the first hour of the first wave of hacks, Twitter decided to stop some of the verified accounts from tweeting anything.

It wasn’t clear either whether all verified users on the social media platform were hacked, but I’m sure you can probably guess how bad the impact would be if they were.

In case you didn’t know, verified users usually include celebrities, journalists, governments, politicians, and heads of state.

No Clarification Given

There was no clarification given by Twitter except a statement that said that its users “may be unable to tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident”. They were also unable to use other unspecified “account functions”.

The unusual thing about this whole incident is the fact that it wasn’t just targetting one or two accounts. Even experts were shocked at how widescale the incident was.

Co-founder of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, Dmitri Alperovitch, said, “This appears to be the worst hack of a major social media platform yet.”

So what exactly went wrong? How did the hackers manage to hack all these accounts?

Well, according to some experts, they believe that it is possible that the hackers could access Twitter’s internal systems.

Michael Borohovski, director of software engineering at security company Synopsys, shared his views and said, “It is highly likely that the attackers were able to hack into the back end or service layer of the Twitter application. If the hackers do have access to the backend of Twitter, or direct database access, there is nothing potentially stopping them from pilfering data in addition to using this tweet-scam as a distraction.”

Soliciting Cryptocurrency

While some of the tweets were deleted almost immediately, it seems like there was some difficulty faced when trying to regain control over some of the accounts.

For example, for billionaire Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, one tweet soliciting cryptocurrency was taken down. But moments later, a second and third tweet appeared.

Someone who was familiar with the incident said that Biden’s campaign was “in touch” with Twitter and explained that Twitter locked Biden’s account “immediately following the breach and removed the related tweet”.

Tesla and other companies that were affected have not spoken out about the incident.

Aftermath

It was only at around 8.30pm EDT (which is 8.30am in Singapore time) on Wednesday that Twitter users with verified accounts could send tweets again.

After the incident, the shares of Twitter dropped by almost 5% in trading after the market closed before they cut their losses.

Blockchain records that are available to the public revealed that the hackers managed to scam about US$110,000 (~S$153,093) worth of cryptocurrency from their victims – the followers of the high-profile users.

Alperovitch, who is now the chair fo the Silverado Policy Accelerator, said that the public technically dodged a bullet.

He said, “We are lucky that given the power of sending out tweets from the accounts of many famous people, the only thing that the hackers have done is scammed about US$110,000 in bitcoin from about 300 people.”

That’s still a lot of money. But I guess it definitely could have been worse.

Now that you know not to do everything your role model asks online, you might as well just watch our video on how WiFi routers work and how you can make them fast even at home: