Major twitter accounts of companies as high as Apple, Biden and Musk fell prey to a crypto scam. The attack took place on Wednesday afternoon, via which hackers took advantage of high-profile Twitter accounts to spread a cryptocurrency scam. Tweets related to bitcoin wallet were posted via these high-profile Twitter accounts.
An address of a bitcoin wallet was posted in each tweet, asking followers to send bitcoins on the given address, providing the false claim that the given bitcoins shall be doubled and sent back. Within a few hours, the scam post was also tweeted by the Twitter accounts of other famous figures such as Barack Obama, Warren Buffett, CashApp, Kim Kardashian and more.
The hacking remains mysterious and the way it was carried out is still being worked upon. However, the initial analysis suggests the hacker used an internal admin tool of Twitter to hack all the mentioned accounts that have millions of followers.
The attack initially hacked Twitter accounts of cryptocurrency organisations. Tweets by Bitcoin, Coindesk, Coinbase and a few more appeared in which they mentioned their partnership with CryptoForHealth and that they will give back 5000 Bitcoins. The tweets being posted by the hacker had a false link attached for the scam to work. Upon detecting the scam, the linked website was taken down. However, links for various bitcoin wallet addresses were being tweeted by hacked accounts.
The security compromise led to Twitter users reporting errors while tweeting from their accounts. According to reports, as many as 12.5 bitcoin, around $116,000 have been collected by the main address posted in these tweets and they have been increasing every minute.
The e-mail addresses were also changed of the accounts which were hacked, usually, these scammers follow high-profile accounts and comment there to gain access to the conversation later on. Yet, an investigation is still being made by Twitter as to how the attack was really planned and executed.
