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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: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2020, @09:02AM
Ah but now you're getting into much more fundamental issues of democracy.
If we had an open and inclusive democracy from the earliest days of our nations, we wouldn't have electricity today. Sound absurd? Think about how absurd electricity sounds. Let's put up, at immense cost, hundreds of thousands of giant wooden poles all around the country. And in between these poles let's string up extremely high power lines that will kill anything, human or animal, that touches one of those wires and anything else. And we know on occasion the poles will give way and the wires all also fall. And when this happens we know they will potentially cause fires, local damage, and even kill people - especially young people who might be more inclined to play around them. Won't anybody think of the children!? And we do this for what? At the time the main purpose of electricity was lighting. You're going to destroy the country and cause countless deaths, including of the children, so the rich won't have to have their servants light their oil lamps at night? How cruel can you be!?
Modern democracies, particularly ours, have trended towards trying to create safety bubbles. Not because it's a good idea for society, but because it's a good idea for reelection. Imagine a politician takes a position, any position, which can be *perceived* as less safe than another position. Now come election time his opponent can frame the incumbent as being reckless or even actively hating the group(s) affected by taking the *perceived* less safe position. I say *perceived* because that's all that matters. It doesn't even matter if the actual decision is indeed more safe. For instance with these lockdowns we've seen dramatically increasing rates of deaths of despair due to suicide / drug overdose / etc. How does the total affect on deaths compare and contrast against a cautious reopening? Doesn't matter - because that's hard and complex and so doesn't really work in a democracy. And of course, what if you don't take safety as a key metric? For instance, thousands of kids have been killed and injured on playgrounds. So shouldn't we ban playgrounds? Obviously not. They're an important part of recreation, growth, and development for kids. Yet indeed a number of districts have indeed already started restricting playground equipment such as swings.
I'm increasingly suspecting that the ancient Greeks were right. For those who may not know, Greek philosophy leaves us little more than brutal criticism of democracy, their own invention and the resultant collapse of their society alongside countless abhorrent decisions including the 'murder by vote' of Socrates himself, still considered one of the greatest minds of all time. But I think one of the most telling things about the problems of democracy is that that Ancient Greeks write of the consequences of democracy from thousands of years ago, as if they were living today. Here [wikipedia.org] is a section of criticisms from one pamphlet of the times:
- Democratic rule acts in the benefit of smaller self-interested factions, rather than the entire polis.
- Collectivizing political responsibility lends itself to both dishonest practices and scapegoating individuals when measures become unpopular.
- By being inclusive, opponents to the system become naturally included within the democratic framework, meaning democracy itself will generate few opponents, despite its flaws.
- A democratic Athens with an imperial policy will spread the desire for democracy outside of the polis.
- The democratic government depends on the control of resources, which requires military power and material exploitation.
- The values of freedom of equality include non-citizens more than it should.
- By blurring the distinction between the natural and political world, democracy leads the powerful to act immorally and outside their own best interest.
These are critiques that could have just as well been written by somebody experiencing the pangs of democracy today.