Major Twitter Hack Ropes In Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Kanye West
On the 15th of July, 2020, Twitter fans frenzied over hacked accounts of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Kanye West, among others. The attackers were Bitcoin thieves who tried to target cryptocurrency owners and steal their Bitcoins.
Elon Musk’s tweet read, “I’m feeling generous because of Covid-19. I’ll double any BTC payment sent to my BTC address for the next one hour. Good luck, and stay safe out there!”
Whereas, Bill Gates’ hacked tweet said, “Everyone is asking me to give back, and now is the time. I’m doubling all payments sent to my BTC address in the next 30 minutes. You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000. Only going on for 30 minutes! Enjoy!”
Such tweets were seen across Twitter. They would appear and then vanish after some time, only to reappear moments later. Other Twitter handles such as @Bitcoin Twitter, Binance, Apple, Gemini, Uber, and Coinbase also were among the accounts that were hacked. Barack Obama was also among the many politicians, celebrities, and executives whose accounts were hacked.
Bill Gates’ team gave a statement refuting the tweet saying, “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.”
Twitter, on the other hand, called this hack a “coordinated social engineering attack.” The investigation into the same is ongoing, although the manner of the attack and the reason was rather clear.
Twitter sent out a tweet in response to the attack saying, “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.”
This wide-scale hack raised questions on what Twitter was doing to save accounts of the people using this social media networking site. Twitter has previously had such cryptocurrency attacks; however, none were on such a massive extent.
An earlier attack in 2018 had compromised the Twitter accounts of Google’s G Suit and Target in a similar cryptocurrency racket. In 2019, the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey’s account was hacked where the hackers sent out racist, anti-Semitic, and sexist tweets. Despite such attacks, it seems like Twitter has failed to provide a better security system for the millions of users currently using their site.
Hackers had given out a link in this large-scale attack on the 15th of July for innocent cryptocurrency users to send their Bitcoins. The link had recorded that it received close to 12.30776555 BTC, which is approximately $113,572.
In response to the hack, Twitter immediately blocked verified account users from temporarily tweeting or resetting their passwords. Although users have been given back access to their accounts, Twitter employees are still working towards fixing the problem and providing a more secure system.
Meanwhile, an Instagram account, Crypto For Health, claimed that the attack was made by them. They posted a story on their Instagram profile, which read, “It was a charity attack. Your money will find its way to the right place.” This news is yet to be verified by Twitter and other authorities.