Yesterday, number of Twitter accounts were compromised in an organized Bitcoin scam that saw some people get scammed out of thousands of dollars. It is believed that the scammers have made close to or over $120,000 (Over Ksh 12M) as the records of every bitcoin transaction are publicly available.
Those Behind the scam gained access to some accounts (verified accounts) of high-profile individuals and companies and sent out tweets like the one shared below.
This is just one account, some of the other high-profile handles targeted include President Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Michael Bloomberg, Apple and many others. Combined, all these accounts have millions of followers. Some of the compromised accounts claimed to have two-factor authentication enabled so the hack seems to be different from most of the others we see on the platform.
How It Happened
Twitter already knows about the scam and so far has taken measures to stop it. The company has also released a statement detailing what happened even as it is still investigating the issue father.
Twitter revealed that they detected a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of its employees with access to the internal systems and tools. This makes sense as that would explain how some people with two-factor authentication enabled still got their accounts compromised.
The company said that once they became aware of the incident, they shut it down by locking down the affected accounts and removing the tweets of the affected accounts. They were quick at this but at that point some damage was already done.
Since the compromised accounts were verified, Twitter limited functionality on all verified accounts even for those who may not have been compromised. This meant that verified users were not able to send out tweets for some time but as of writing this the restrictions have been eased and the accounts can tweet as normal.
As for the compromised accounts, there are still steps to be taken for the accounts to be restored to their owners.
I will update you on this incase there are ny new developments.