Twitter Hack: Bitcoin scammers hacked into Twitter accounts of Apple, Elon Musk, Barak Obama, and scores others; Twitter hackings continue despite enabling 2FA
A worldwide cryptocurrency scamming network hacked into the Twitter accounts of major companies and individuals. Hackers took over the Twitter accounts of big handles and promised investors to double the bitcoins invested. The unknown scammers used the hacked Twitter accounts to tweet identical messages promising that they were “giving back 5000 BTC ($45,889,950) to the community.”
The Twitter hacking started off with Twitter handles of cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance, KuCoin Gemini, Coinbase, Litecoin’s Charlie Lee, Tron’s Justin Sun, Bitcoin, Bitfinex, Ripple, Cash App, Coindesk, etc. All the tweets had a similar message and all the tweets from the hacked Twitter accounts led to the same link associated with “Crypto For Health.”
However, the Twitter hack was not just limited to the cryptocurrency community. In just a matter of an hour, the Twitter hack spread to many big-ticket Twitter handles like ex-US President Barak Obama, Tesla Motors CEO, Elon Musk, Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, Apple, Uber, Apple, Kanye West, Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett.
At the time of writing this article, the hack is ongoing, with similar cryptocurrency-related tweets being posted on verified Twitter accounts. Interestingly even deleting the tweet doesn’t seem to work. Bill Gates or someone handling his verified Twitter account the message (image above) at 1.36 pm right after it was noticed. But it reappeared with 10 minutes at exactly 1.48 pm.
Bill Gates’ spokesperson told the reported that “We can confirm that this tweet was not sent by Bill Gates. This appears to be part of a larger issue that Twitter is facing. Twitter is aware and working to restore the account.”
NEW — statement from a spokesperson for Bill Gates.
"We can confirm that this tweet was not sent by Bill Gates. This appears to be part of a larger issue that Twitter is facing. Twitter is aware and working to restore the account.” pic.twitter.com/v37Jvs76Jl
— Teddy Schleifer (@teddyschleifer) July 15, 2020
This Twitter hack is shocking and very dangerous as many of the above Twitter accounts had enabled 2Factor authentication and yet the bitcoin scammers managed to hack into their accounts and tweet the scam content. The scammers were/are pretty successful too. In a matter of hours, many fell prey to the promise of doubling bitcoins tweets from verified Twitter accounts and sent 11.3 BTC(Bitcoins) or roughly $103,960 to the cryptocurrency wallet mentioned in the tweet.
ALL MAJOR CRYPTO TWITTER ACCOUNTS HAVE BEEN COMPROMISED.
2FA / strong password was used for @Gemini account. We are investigating and hope to have more information shortly. https://t.co/X3C0uJzc6C
— Cameron Winklevoss (@winklevoss) July 15, 2020
Many tech gurus say this might be an inside job because it would be near about impossible for outside hackers to hack into this many Twitter accounts at the same time. Some of these accounts are 2FA enabled which could make it extremely difficult for hackers without inside knowledge to execute this hack+scam.
Since this happened after market hours, the Twitter stock managed to restrict the downward slide to just 3% at the time of writing this article.
