High profile Twitter users targeted in Bit coins cam
In one of the brashest online swindles, a number of high profile Twitter accounts, including that of US presidential hopeful Joe Biden, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Microsoft Co-founder Bill Gates were simultaneously hacked on Wednesday.
The fake tweets put out by the hackers encouraged account holders to post their crypto currency funds to an anonymous Bitcoin address under the guise that they'll double their "investment"—US$ 2,000 was offered for every US$ 1,000 that was sent.
(Bitcoin is a popular vehicle for this type of scam because once a victim sends money, the design of Bitcoin, with no institution in charge, makes it essentially impossible to recover the funds.)
In the first surge, the Twitter accounts of prominent cryptocurrency leaders and companies were hacked. But soon after, the ambit widened to include a Who’s Who of Americans in politics, entertainment and tech. Among them were Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Warren Buffett, Bezos and Mike Bloomberg.
Some of the accounts were quickly back under their owners' control and the tweets sent out, when those accounts were compromised, were quickly deleted. But in some cases similar tweets emitted again from the same accounts, suggesting Twitter was powerless to regain control.
For a couple of hours, Twitter disabled its service, as it scrambled to prevent the scam from spreading further. The service was restored around 8:30 on Wednesday night. Twitter's chief executive, said in a post on Wednesday night it was a "tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible that this happened. We're diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened," NYT reported.
Twitter’s investigation into the breach revealed that several employees who had access to internal systems had their accounts compromised in a “coordinated social engineering attack,” a spokesman said, referring to attacks that trick people into giving up their credentials. The attackers then used Twitter’s internal systems to tweet from high-profile accounts like that of US presidential candidate Joe Biden, the NYT added.
The newspaper said there was little evidence of who conducted the attack. One of the most obvious suspects for an attack of this scale, North Korea, has been documented to have used Bitcoin extensively in the past. By Wednesday evening, the Bitcoin wallets promoted in the tweets had received over $100,000.