Stop me if you’ve heard this one before; I’m feeling generous today. For the next 30 minutes I’ll double any cash amount sent to me.
If you’re a regular on Twitter you may have seen Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mr Beast, Apple, Warren Buffet and many more tweet out this message with a Bitcoin address of where to send the money. A lot of people have asked us this last week how something like that happens.
Turns out this was all made possible due to employees in the company and a tool they have access to. Twitter likely won’t ever tell us exactly what the tool allowed them to do. The two most likely theories are that it simply let them tweet as any high profile account that they wanted or that it allowed them to reset the email address associated with the accounts. This would have allowed anyone to use their own email accounts, reset the password, and gain full access to the hacked account. It’s also unclear if they employees were paid off to do this or if they were socially engineered or tricked into giving access of the tool over to the hackers.
So far over 400 people have fallen victim to the scam. As of writing this the most money lost in a single transaction was $40,000 and originated from a crypto currency exchange in Japan. Some of you might be rightfully asking how we know this is bitcoin transfers are anonymous. While the sender and recipient are anonymous the transactions are not. In fact, the transactions are public record. It’s possible to trace every payment made to those accounts and even where those accounts send money after the fact. You can literally watch the hackers spend away the money they’ve scammed but will never be sure where that money is going.
Since this is a new scam, and not a lot is known about it, and it tricked one of the premier technology companies… who wouldn’t be concerned with the election drawing near? This type of hacking, could affect a lot!