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.

Crypto Business World
CBW - External Analyst
INDIA