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Verified Twitter accounts of World richest people Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett were hacked on Wednesday, July 15, 2020
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Hackers tweeted that they were “giving back” 5000 BTC ($45,889,950) to their community
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The crypto address linked to the scam has allegedly received more than 11.3 BTC, or roughly $103,960 (N40,284,500)
Hackers on Wednesday, July 15, 2020 carried out a well-coordinated cryptocurrency giveaway scam after gaining access to at least top 22 richest Twitter accounts globally.
After the attack, hackers allegedly received millions of dollars and Twitter released a statement a few minutes after the biggest attack that it is investigating the hacking.
Mode of hacking
After their access, they used he accounts to send message to their victims’ millions of followers that they would double payments in bitcoin sent to a certain cryptocurrency wallet.
The accounts sent messages related to cryptocurrency, with most of the messages promising to double the money of anyone who sent Bitcoin to a specific cryptocurrency wallet.
Top 22 Richest Twitter Accounts That Were Hacked
Some of the biggest names in politics, entertainment and technology have had their Twitter accounts hacked, they are:
- Bill Gates
- Barack Obama
- Kanye West
- Michael Bloomberg
- Warren Buffett
- Litecoin’s Charlie Lee
- Tron’s Justin Sun
- Elon Musk
- Apple
- Uber
- JoeBiden
- Jeff Bezos
- Bitcoin
- Coinbase
- Binance
- CZ_Binance
- Gemini
- Bitfinex
- Kucoin
- Gate .io
- Coindesk
- Cash App
How hackers collected over 11BTC from Bill Gate, Barack Obama, Apple’s Twitter Followers in Crypto Scam
You may want to ask: Many bitcoins did hackers made from the hacked accounts?
At the time of this report, the address linked to the scam, according to coindesk.com appears to have received more than 11.3 BTC, or roughly $103,960. That’s more than N40 million within 10 minutes of the illicit act.
Conflict report
Research was ongoing at the time of this report to ascertain the level of damage, however, cybersecurity news platform The Hacker News submitted that the bitcoin account involved had already received nearly $1,060,000.
Another report say, the scammers may have stolen as much as $10m.
Victims of the hacked accounts
Considering the influence of the account owners, it’s gathered that more than 300 people had fallen for the scam.
Some of them reportedly sent more than $100,000 to the wallet. Many of the tweets were quickly removed by the hackers before Twitter stepped in.
Why did the hackers use bitcoin?
It may be difficult to track the person behind the hacking considering the anonymity of bitcoin.
However, the address to which the BTC were sent may be tracked by expert, it’d be extremely impossible to back the funds collected from the victims.
According to expert, “the messages were an iteration of a long-running scam in which hackers pose as public figures on Twitter, and promise to match or even triple any funds that are sent to their Bitcoin wallets.”
Recently, the name of Philippines’s Finance Secretary Carlos G. Dominguez was used for bitcoin scam, in which he wrote the US Department of Justice and Facebook to help take down such accounts using his name dubiously.
Twitter promises thorough investigation
Meanwhile, Twitter management in a series of tweets has promised to look into the security breach, “We are aware of a security incident impacting accounts on Twitter. We are investigating and taking steps to fix it. We will update everyone shortly.”
What Twitter is doing about it
Twitter has taken three major measures, they are:
- Temporarily block users from Tweeting
- Temporarily disabling password reset
- Blocking other account functionalities
Experts say it may affect the credibility of the microblogging platform temporarily
