/ciol/media/agency_attachments/c0E28gS06GM3VmrXNw5G.png)
Follow Us/ciol/media/post_banners/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Twitter-Scam.jpg)
The Twitter accounts of high profile figures and corporations, including former United States President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Rapper Kanye West and his family, Mike Bloomberg, Uber and Apple, were among those hacked on Wednesday.
On the official account of Musk, it appeared to offer to double any Bitcoin payment sent to the address of his digital wallet "for the next 30 minutes". "I'm feeling generous because of Covid-19," the tweet added, along with a Bitcoin link address. These tweets were deleted just minutes after they were first posted.
But that did not stop users from sending the said cryptocurrency to the links. In the short time that it was online, the link displayed in the tweets of targeted accounts received hundreds of contributions. It totalled more than $100,000 (£80,000), according to publicly available blockchain records.
"This Twitter scam appears to be the worst and the largest social media scam," said Dmitri Alperovitch. Dmitri co-founded cyber-security company CrowdStrike.
Bitcoin Scams are not uncommon
Twitter has seen these "double your money" scams many times over the years. It even took to identify some major cryptocurrency accounts and secure them. Further, the social-media giant banned any account impersonating a verified account.
Commenting on this, Mr Arjun Vijay, Co-Founder and COO of Giottus Cryptocurrency Exchange, said:
These kinds of scams have happened in the past. But never at this scale. It was a well-coordinated attack where multiple accounts got hacked at the same time, with the same tweets directing users to the same scam site. Unfortunately, more than 373 users fell for the scam, losing a total of 89 lakh rupees before the Tweets were removed by the Twitter authority. The hacker had complete access to Twitter. He could post anything from any of the official accounts. But he chose to seek Bitcoins through false promises. People should be more careful. There is no easy money, and most Crypto giveaways that ask for contributions are scams. We hope this brings awareness, and Twitter users do not fall for these kinds of scams again.
That, being said, this is the first time that the actual accounts of so many public figures were hijacked and on this large scale. This compromise, on this scale, shows that there is a problem with the platform itself.
Response from Twitter officials
"Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened," tweeted CEO Jack Dorsey late on Wednesday. He further added, "We're diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened."
As a short term step, Twitter took the extraordinary step of stopping many verified accounts marked with blue ticks from tweeting altogether. It also denied password reset requests along with disabling some other account functions. Twitter is still working on the fix.
The possible reason for this could be some loophole at the end of Twitter. The Twitter support account also tweeted, "We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people. They successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools."
While Twitter is working on a fix, and bringing out significant updates, we advise user-discretion. There is no possible way to reverse the bitcoin transaction. But don't fall prey to anyone claiming to double your money. Or asking you details to get back the bitcoins/money.