TWITTER HACKED!: EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW

Wednesday, 15 July 2020, was a normal day for users of Twitter, the popular social media platform. At least until they realised that a coordinated hack had occurred at Twitter Headquarters and was manifested through several verified and/or largely followed influencer accounts.

Dubbed "The Greatest Twitter Hack of All Time" by hacker news website @TheHackerNews, this cryptocurrency hack was used by malicious persons to amass over 100,000 USD in bitcoin.
In the attack, several verified / influencer Twitter accounts were used to make dubious requests asking users to transfer bitcoins to a certain wallet in order to get double of whatever they transfer in return. The affected accounts were those of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, first Black USA President Barrack Obama, Tesla's Elon Musk, corporate accounts of Apple and Uber and a host of other Twitter accounts. Most tweets sent out of these accounts were slight variants of this message:

"Everyone is asking me to give back, and now is the time.

I am doubling all payments sent to my BTC address for the next 30 minutes. You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000.

BTC Address - bc1qxy2kgdyg……..

Only going on for 30 minutes! Enjoy!"

Twitter users may have been caught off-guard by this scam as reports state that the hackers have raised around $120,000 from this heist alone.

It is currently unclear the source of this scam, and/or how exactly they gained access to several high profile accounts simultaneously. However, Twitter Support has called the hack a "coordinated social engineering attack" targeted at Twitter employees with access to internal systems and tools, and have swung into action to manage the cyber attack. Affected accounts had malicious tweets deleted and were initially disabled from tweeting, password reset and a few other account functionalities until Twitter Support got a hold of the situation. Until this morning, all verified Twitter accounts were also restricted from tweeting completely.

Hopefully, Twitter will use this incident as a learning point to implement better security processes in their environment. But one can only imagine how the Twitter Incident Management room would be buzzing this morning!