The biggest hacker attack in the history of socials: cheated $121,000

By Roberto D. | CryptoFarm | 17 Jul 2020

On the evening of July 15, Twitter was the victim of a very serious hacker attack. A huge number of important verified accounts have been compromised: the hackers have taken control of the profiles, publishing a scam message inviting you to send Bitcoin to have them doubled.

Among others, the profiles of entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, political figures such as Barack Obama and the current democratic candidate Joe Biden, singers like Kanye West and his wife Kim Kardashian and companies like Apple and Uber have been involved. .

The published scam messages remained active for about two hours, before Twitter managed to take action: the scammers invited to send Bitcoin to a specific address, promising that double the amount requested would be returned. As can be seen from blockchain.com, the scammers managed to get over 121 thousand dollars.

Twitter announced that an internal platform tool was used for the attack, which allowed hackers to easily take control of the numerous profiles involved. We do not know what else the attackers may have done (for example, reading confidential messages from the personalities involved), nor how they managed to obtain a similar tool.

To try to solve the problem, Twitter initially prevented the accounts involved from publishing new tweets or requesting a password reset, effectively removing legitimate users from their accounts.

It is not yet clear who the author, or the perpetrators, of the attack: according to BBC reports, the site to which some tweets invited to send money (cryptoforhealth.com) would be attributable to a Californian man named Anthony Elias.

Although the situation now seems to have returned to normal, it was an unprecedented attack in the history of Twitter (and social networks in general), which will certainly lead to great reflections on the risks of future attacks.

I apologize for the culpable delay in reporting the news, I speak only now because I wanted to get as much information as possible before writing about it.

Anyway what do you think of this attack? Do you think that twitter (and social networks in general) are insecure? Let me know yours in the comments and thanks for getting here, see you next time!

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