On Wednesday, 15th July, Twitter went through a major hack on the system. The hack targeted major high-profile accounts such as Barack Obama, Apple, Elon Musk, Mike Bloomberg, Kanye West, and more.
This major hack took place on various profiles and since stopped by Twitter. This was a part of major bitcoin scams involving major companies and personalities.
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Here’s how the hack unraveled:
Hackers got access to an internal Twitter admin tool used to take control of the verified accounts. Many underground hacking groups received screenshots of this tool.
Following the hack, high-profile accounts of celebrities and companies, they tweeted “Feeling grateful doubling all payments sent to my BTC address! You send $1,000, I send back $2,000! Only doing this for the next 30 minutes.”.
Elon Musk’s account was among the first hacked in a series of compromised accounts. Kim Kardashian West, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Wiz Khalifa, Warren Buffett, YouTuber MrBeast, Wendy’s, Uber, and CashApp also posted the cryptocurrency scam.
The hack was also centered on cryptocurrency-focused accounts, with usernames bitcoin, ripple, coindesk, coinbase, and finance were also tweeting “We have partnered with CryptoForHealth and are giving back 5000 BTC to the community,” followed by a link to a website. Twitter tried pulling off the site but hackers moved fast and shifted to sharing multiple bitcoin wallet addresses.
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How Twitter responded
Twitter finally announced at 2:45 p.m. PT Wednesday afternoon, referring to it as a “security incident.” The company started limiting tweets from verified accounts.
The cryptocurrency scam tweet posted on several accounts were taken down soon. The hacker was reportedly able to make over $100,000 within hours of the hack.
Twitter also temporarily limited the functionality of verified accounts. The company says it will restore access once it has verified that it is secure to do so. Twitter also said that it has taken steps to limit access to internal systems and tools.
The platform says that the hack was “a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.”
The investigation is still going on and most of the accounts can tweet again but it may suffer through some occasional problems, as they continue to fix the issue.
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Twitter also said that it has taken steps to limit access to internal systems and tools. This will go down in history along with the account hack of Jack Dorsey’s – a series of insulting or racist messages were posted on the feed, without his knowledge.
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Sushmita Choubey
Marketer to the core, a writer from the soul. Engineer and an MBA turned budding tech writer - dabbling her hands in all genres of writing from tech to fiction. If not writing, you will always find me reading anything and everything. Otherwise, you will find me learning new languages.