Twitter reveals that the straggling hack is a result of well designed social engineering threats on its employees. The twitter accounts of Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Elon Musk were the targets of these bitcoin scammers. Other people like entertainers, tech executives, uber, apple,, and other businesses were not spared in this sprawling hack that was carried out on Wednesday, and this was a large scale hack. In the same vein, other twitter accounts with over millions of followers were also compromised, and this brought the question” if Twitter is doing enough to protect its users. The truth is that hacking isn’t new to twitter but the magnitude of the site’s attack on Wednesday was a brutal one.
A deleted tweet from Musk read, “I’m feeling generous because of this pandemic; I will double any BTC payment sent to my BTC address for the next hour. Good luck, and stay safe out there, almost the same tweet was post on Gates twitter and it reads “I’m doubling all payments sent to my BTC address for the next 30 minutes. You send “$1000; I will “send back $2000” this dubious tweet will appear and disappear within minutes. But the spokesperson for Gates swiftly counters this, tweeting that such wasn’t from the Microsoft Giant.
Another account used for a similar tweet was that of Obama. This tweet was sent to his 120 million followers. The tweet read that the former president was giving back because of the pandemic and that he will also double all bitcoin sent to his address within the next 2 hours. ‘Twitter couldn’t ascertain immediately how the hacking was done. though, they were an update from them detailing that they were on the case to unravel the mystery, and it was termed to be a well designed social engineering attack. In their tweet, the site said that solution on hacking is on the way, and tips on how to secure accounts should be learned.
The first 2 hours of this brutal attack twitter didn’t seem to be able to manage the attack. The sent out a tweet on their page that some users might not be able to access twitter as the site tries to tackle and reviewed the problem. They went further to remove the tweets of screenshots that show internal tools that the hackers used for the hacking. The CEO of Twitter tweeted late on the evening of Wednesday that it was a tough day for them at twitter. He promised to reveal all their findings of the attack.
Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.
We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.
? to our teammates working hard to make this right.
— jack (@jack) July 16, 2020
Most of the verified users got an error message when they attempt to tweet, but Twitter has now rectified the problem, so those with a verified account can now tweet. The Bitcoin address used for this account was discovered and a total of 12.30776555BTC was received already, which is about $113,572. But twitter reiterated that they are working to get things back to normal.
