Hacked High profile Twitter Accounts Pleaded for Transferring Funds in a Major Bitcoin Scam
In an unprecedented Twitter security breach on Wednesday, July 16, several high profile Twitter accounts including the billionaires, top politicians, top crypto companies, crypto- exchanges, and their CEOs were hacked in apparently a Bitcoin scam. Consequently, the hacked premiere accounts started requesting for Bitcoin donations assuring to double the Bitcoins in return.
The Attack was massive and severe in which official twitter accounts of Google, Apple, Uber, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden, and Kanye West were targeted.
Foremost crypto exchanges and CEOs of top crypto companies have also been targeted in this attack. Binance, Bitfinex, Bitcoin, and, Gemini, Ripple, The Tron Foundation, KuCoin, Coindesk, Coinbase, Changpeng Zhao(CEO of Binance), Vitalik Buterin(Ethereum founder), Justin Sun (Tron Founder) tweeted :
“We have partnered with Cryptoforhealth and are giving back 5000 BTC to the community.” The tweet also included the URL of the con website.
The verified accounts of Barak Obama, Joe Biden, and Kanye West requested donations in cryptos.
Bill Gates account twitted “Everyone is asking me to give back. You send $ 1.000, I send you back $ 2,000.”
The scam website quickly went offline after the breach. Site Domain Registrar Kristaps Ronka (CEO of NameSilo) informed that the domain had been suspended after they received the complaint.
Most of the tweets were quickly deleted by the original account holders but some accounts including the account of Tesla CEO Elon Musk generated multiple tweets after each tweet was deleted.
Bitcoin Scam
In the short time after the link was displayed on the breached official accounts, millions of fund which summed up more than $ 1,00,000 ((£80,000), was deposited on the link. Approximately $ 120,000 worth Bitcoins were transferred through the link.
Response from Twitter
Response from Twitter came quite late after 8 hours of the hotchpotch. Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey twitted, “Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened. We are diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.”
Interestingly, Bitcoin’s price didn’t show significant fluctuations after this hacking episode.
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) ropes in CipherTrace and Chainalysis
Multiple law enforcement investigating agencies including the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is probing the matter intensely. The FBI has contacted premiere blockchain forensics firms CipherTrace and Chainalysis to investigate into this matter. Both the firms have confirmed about the FBI investigation but denied to disclose more.
Originally published at https://cbw.cryptoassetrating.com on July 13, 2020.
