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Musk, Obama, Biden, Bezos, Gates—bitcoin scam hits Twitter in coordinated blitz:
Twitter accounts of the rich and famous—including Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Joe Biden—were simultaneously hijacked on Wednesday and used to push cryptocurrency scams.
As of 3:58 PM California time, the wallet address used to receive victim’s digital coin had received more than $118,000, though it wasn't clear all of it came from people who fell for the scam. It The bitcoin came from 356 transactions all occurred over about a four-hour span on Tuesday. The wallet address appeared in tweets from at least 15 accounts—some with tens of millions of followers—that promoted fraudulent incentives to transfer money.
“I’m giving back to all my followers,” one now-deleted tweet from Musk’s account said. “I am doubling all payments sent to the Bitcoin address below. You send 0.1 BTC, I send 0.2 BTC back!” A tweet from the Bezos account said the same thing. “Everyone is asking me to give back, and now is the time,” a Gates tweet said. “I am doubling all payments sent to my BTC address for the next 30 minutes. You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000.
Other hijacked accounts belonged to Barack Obama, Apple, Kanye West, and a raft of cryptocurrency entrepreneurs.
[...] That so many social media accounts were taken over in such a short time and remained hijacked for so long is extraordinary if not unprecedented.
[...] As the hijackings continued, Twitter said that while it investigated, it was suspending the ability of many but not all Twitter users to tweet or respond to tweets. Accounts belonging to verified users were unable to use the platform except to send direct messages. Instead they got a message that said: "This request looks like it might be automated. To protect our users from spam and other malicious activity, we can’t complete this action right now. Please try again later." Unverified accounts worked normally.
If it looks too good to be true...
Also at: AlJazeera, BBCTech, CNET, MITTech, SecurityWeek, and Threatpost.
(Score: 4, Funny) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday July 16 2020, @02:49AM (3 children)
That is untrue.
Bill Gates is definitely sending me a free copy of Windows NT4 on CD. It'll arrive any day now.
(Score: 1) by petecox on Thursday July 16 2020, @04:09AM (2 children)
Shuttleworth did send me Warty Warthog CDs back in the days of dialup.
(Score: 4, Funny) by DECbot on Thursday July 16 2020, @05:55PM
That Linux thing is a scam. Large corporations will leverage your free software to build empires on the internet and you the developer will never get paid for your time. It'll never catch on. It's best if you stick to quality, proprietary OSes that will stick around for the long haul, like HP-UX, Windows NT4, or OS/2 Warp.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday July 16 2020, @09:00PM
I actually received a free set of Encyclopedia Britannia CDs in the early 2000s (I think).
It wasn't that great though, because everytime you clicked on an article it prompted you to change discs. I did install the whole lot one time, but it pretty much filled my hard drive if I remember rightly.
Then Wikipedia came along.