A massive hacking across the most influential as well as verified accounts on Twitter has surfaced recently. Some of the names included famous big wigs like Elon Musk, Joe Biden, George Wallace, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Wiz Khalifa, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Mike Bloomberg, Barack Obama, and Bill Gates.
The tweets are using people to visit a particular address and use BTC.
In return, they (the hacker) would endow them 2:1 returns aka double the money invested. Elon Musk one of the “victims” first noticed this scam. However, even though it was deleted, it reappeared, and a shocking message appeared as: ‘feeling grateful, doubling all payments sent to my BTC address! You send $1,000, I send back $2,000! Only doing this for the next 30 minutes.
This prompted Twitter to temporarily revoked the publishing right of some of the verified accounts so it will not keep reappearing. Other businesses were victimized as well; these include Coinbase., Changpeng Zhao (CZ), Binance, Kucoin, Justin Sun, and Gemini.
When traced, it was found out that the bitcoin address and the suspects were able to accumulate $100,000 (11 BTC). When users went to the site, there was a cryptic message that runs like:
Just Read All Transaction Outputs
As Text You Take Risk When Use Bitcoin
For Your Twitter Game Bitcoin is Traceable
Why Not Monero
Who is Monero?
A well-known crypto community, Monero is popular because it offers coin systems with more privacy features than Bitcoin. This type is preferred by many scammers and those with underground businesses.
Dimmer, it seems on Twitter. According to Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, who conveyed alarm and concern over this period, said his team is investigating the situation and also working on extending reasons and depth to the incident.
As of press time, the access to the hacked accounts was restored, enhancing access to tools such as password reset, etc.
Reports also revealed that this could be a coordinated social engineering attack done by a group. Besides, it mentions the group must have successfully locked on Twitter employees. A backdoor could be they got access to one of the twitter employees.
How? The hack that targets phone or an account and is seemingly byzantine since most of them are using robust passwords and had switched on 2FA (two-factor authentication).
A report from the BBC said that various malicious tweets linked in users to a web address cryptoforhealth.com. The registered web address is owned by “Anthony Elias” with e-email credentials as mkworth5@gmail.com. Twitter hacker details Source: @lawmaster Further investigation revealed that Cryptoforhealth owns an Instagram handle too.
The account has “It was us” in its bio, making it looks creepier. The bio ended the profile caption with, “It was a charity attack your money will find its way to the right place.”
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