News is trending all over about how Twitter accounts belonging to Elon Musk, former President Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, Wiz Khalifa, Uber, Gemini, Floyd Mayweather, Warren Buffet, Mike Bloomberg, Kim Kardashian and Apple have all been compromised - and counting.
This is still an active threat and could come from any Twitter account using any form of manipulation for bait! I have not seen sufficient evidence that Twitter has resolved this threat.
Update 7/16/2020: Twitter is saying this was a coordinated social engineering attack that their employees were dumb enough to fall for. As a result, world leaders, corporations, and celebrities (plus all of our accounts, too) are potentially compromised; for all we know there will be a user/pass leak for sale in the days coming; clearly we CANNOT trust Twitter with our security. Way to go, Twitter. Good luck recovering from this one.
Coinbase, Binance, KuCoin, CoinDesk, TRON foundation, BitFinex, Justin Sun, Ripple, Crypto Bitlord, and even Bitcoin's accounts have sent out similar tweets. It appears all accounts have been compromised.
Tweets from the attackers were reappearing as fast as they were being deleted again and again on Elon Musk's account.
Gemini claimed to have used an extremely strong passphrase with 2FA and they were still compromised. Twitter IS compromised; not the individuals.
According to Rachel Lerman with The Washington Post, the attackers left tweets (now deleted, though attackers continued tweets for hours) from Elon Musk's account saying "Feeling greatful, 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."
Trevor Noah with the Daily Show discussing the subject, Opinions here are not all shared with my own or Publish0x as a whole, but this a part of a fundraiser for fighting racial and economic disparities, as well as unwarranted incarcerations:
Similar tweets were sent from all of the other accounts, sometimes using COVID-19 relief as a way to bait false donations:
I just looked up the Bitcoin address on the blockchain and discovered many people fell for this and are still sending donations, as of this moment 370+ individuals have been scammed out of 12.86 BTC which holds a current value of $118,119 USD and counting:
As of 7-17-2020 the total amount claimed between multiple Bitcoin accounts was estimated at $121,000 USD.
Twitter announced that they are investigating the security vulnerability and taking steps to fix it. Additionally, they made users aware that they may be unable to tweet or reset their passwords until this has been resolved.
Unfortunately, this is code for "it's not fixed yet":
Despite this announcement, I was able to change my passphrase and retweet:
This is no doubt an incredibly shameful act and will only bring negative attention to the cryptocurrency community. I think it's important that we illustrate the criminality behind this type of behavior as unacceptable in our communities that we work hard to keep clean.
Always exercise caution with cryptocurrencies!
Anyone profiting off of human misery in a time like this deserves the worst possible punishment allowable by law. I deliberately stopped writing about politics, but I find it very interesting the Chump's favorite social media platform just delivered a massive hit to the democratic party, and the accounts used were his opposition; he's also known for terrible spelling. I agree with @Undoomed, this appears to be an inside job. I refuse to write about politics beyond that, I think you know where I stand.
One thing I can say for certain is that this was the act of a coward and one that cannot spell very well. In Musk's tweet grateful was "greatful".
As of 6:50 AM CTZ on 7-16-2020, it appears they moved the rest of the money, though a few more payments came in, the latest of which was at roughly 3 AM CTZ:
Transactions: 377
Total Received: 12.86597065 BTC
Total Sent: 12.85345191 BTC
Final Balance: 0.01251874 BTC (pending confirmations)
I am truly sorry for anyone that was impacted by this. The blockchain activity of the primary address used by the attacker/s: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/bc1qxy2kgdygjrsqtzq2n0yrf2493p83kkfjhx0wlh?page=1
Coinbase has put up this waiver in an attempt to mitigate criminal transactions:
For now, exercise EXTREME CAUTION around any Twitter tweets, retweets, and comments for misinformation or new potential attacks from different accounts using a different form of leverage or manipulation!
-Thomas Wolf
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