Social media hacking has been around for a while now, but this seems to be the biggest yet. Yesterday, there was a major twitter hack of tech companies, billionaires, and politicians’ Twitter accounts.
The accounts of billionaires like Kanye West, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos have been compromised by scammers.
What You Need To Know
The Genesis
The hack started with the account of Paypal co-founder, Elon Musk. There was a tweet from his account encouraging people to send money to a Bitcoin wallet and have them doubled in return.
Shortly after, the hack spread to other accounts like Kim Kardashian, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden, Apple, Uber, Kanye West, Mike Bloomberg, Kim Kardashian.
The Losses
Many people actually fell for the scam, which has been said to gulp over a million dollars so far.
These scammers apparently didn’t stop there, as even major cryptocurrency accounts weren’t spared. Accounts like Cash App, Coinbase, Gemini and Binance were also compromised in the Twitter Hack.
There is even a screenshot of Twitter Support’s Account tweeting something similar cirulating, but the authenticity of that has not been confirmed by them.
The Diagnosis
After some time, at about 4:00am today, Twitter Support stated what it suspected to be the gateway through which the hackers were able to gain access to the accounts.
We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020
We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf. We’re looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed and will share more here as we have it.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020
The Remedy
Twitter, through its support account, said that they would have to temporarily disable all verified accounts to stop the scam from spreading any further. They said:
Once we became aware of the incident, we immediately locked down the affected accounts and removed Tweets posted by the attackers.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020
This was disruptive, but it was an important step to reduce risk. Most functionality has been restored but we may take further actions and will update you if we do.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020
The situation keeps unfolding and we’re sure you’re as excited as us to see the end of everything and see these hackers brought to justice.
