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posted by chromas on Thursday July 16 2020, @12:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the TANSTAAFL dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday July 16 2020, @07:29PM

    Here's an interesting take on the breach. [fortenf.org] It posits that maybe the bitcoin scam was all they could figure out to do in the short time (how long before someone notices they can't access their twitter account any more) they had to effect some results.

    Which does makes sense. It also implies that the miscreants were not well organized and this wasn't a focused hack on Twitter. If that's the case and they just got lucky, that could mean that it was all just what it seems.

    I'd be really interested to know what "social engineering" was done to get to one of the folks with access to the internal management tools/systems.

    It seems unlikely that this was just luck, finding one or more folks at Twitter who *just happen to have* access to those tools/systems. What's more likely is a targeted attack on specific individuals *known* to the scammers.

    That implies a much higher level of organization/planning than some hack scammer lucking into the intrusion of the year.

    If that was indeed the case, then such a group would have already known what they wanted to do with such access *before* they executed the breach.

    Then again, a bunch of accounts for Bitcoin exchanges and related businesses were hijacked too. Maybe they were the initial targets, and they got way more access than they ever imagined?

    As I said at the start of this thread, there are a lot of unanswered questions.

    I don't know the details or the circumstances. I'd like to find out though.

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
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