The Twitter Bitcoin Hack allegedly originated with a forum post on the grey market, as reported by Reuters. The worst scandal in the history of the platform, days before the hack, a user on the forum OGUsers offered to provide access to exclusive accounts for cash rewards between $2,000 and $3,000 apiece. From here, things escalated on July 15th, when a series of high profile Twitter profiles tweeted messages to audiences declaring that they would be “giving 5000 BTC back to the community” and directing users to cryptoforhealth.com.
The first one to have been targeted was Elon Musk’s account. And on the list of the breached accounts that tweeted the scam are Bill Gates, Uber, Apple, Kanye West, Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg, Joe Biden, and former president Barack Obama, among others. Most of the accounts tweeted a variation of a message that asks the users to send a Bitcoin to a specific address in a 30-minute window to have it return double, prompting some users to follow instructions and send over Bitcoins to the scammers.
Twitter entered a state of panic and did what it does best: Burn everything to the ground. To prevent more messages to scam users, Twitter temporarily removed the ability for verified users to tweet. Twitter got the situation under control and restored the ability to tweet at around 8:30 PM Eastern to the verified-accounts, and confirmed that it had opened an investigation into the hack.
According to a preliminary investigation done by Twitter, the scammers targeted employees in a social engineering attack, forcing them to give them access to internal systems and tools that enabled them to reset passwords or take direct control of the targeted account.
With more than 130 accounts compromised from the attack, some user questions arose. For example, if the hackers had any access to draft, templates, or any DM. Considering the names of the users implicated in the incident, and the ones that we do not know about, legislators and lawyers are going to have a field day. Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri drafted a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey asking for answers to questions about the scope of the breach and any potential implications. Not to mention the possibility of personal data of an ex-president going public. It all leads up to the announcement of an FBI investigation, by the San Francisco Division, and New York governor Andrew Cuomo to direct his Department of Financial Services and any other relevant state agencies to investigate the incident.
Sources indicate that the damages, in Bitcoin, are in the range of $100.000. and a hacker known as Kirk is believed to be the mastermind behind the incident. However, the extent of the damages is unknown at this time, with much of the investigation ongoing. As the situation is developing, we will update you on the story.
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