Last week we saw Twitter face the biggest hack of its existence, and one that the company is still trying to save face from as its reputation took a hammering. Especially when it was revealed that there was inside involvement and a dodgy internal tool that helped hackers gain a foothold inside the social media platform.
Since then, Twitter has revealed in a blog post that 130 accounts were targeted and that the hackers were able to initiate a password reset, log in to accounts and send tweets from 45 of them. During that time, hackers were able to download account data belonging to eight unverified users.
But what exactly was it all for? Well, as possibly suggested when it happened, money. Essentially it looks like the hackers may have been looking to leverage star power to try and earn some money through cryptocurrency.
According to Forbes, Coinbase and other cryptocurrency exchanges were able to stop some customers from sending bitcoin to the hackers by blacklisting the hackers’ wallet address. Specifically, Coinbase says it prevented just over 1,000 customers from sending around $280,000 worth of bitcoin during last Wednesday’s attack.
Roughly 14 Coinbase users sent around $3,000 worth of bitcoin to the scam’s wallet address before the company moved to blacklist it, the company said. And that’s just one company reporting on the transactions they stopped. Twitter accounts belonging to cryptocurrency exchanges including Binance and Gemini were also targeted during Wednesday’s attack. Apparently, the hackers may have made close to $300 000 in total from the scams.
Which again reaffirms to the world that cryptocurrency has a long way to go before being it can be treated legitimately as a safe currency. And that some people are far too quick to respond to any get rich quick scheme.
Last Updated: July 22, 2020
Son of Banana Jim
July 22, 2020 at 20:09
The real prize wasn’t the attempt at a bitcoin heist, it was getting into and copying the DMs of all those blue checkmarks. No wonder Disney requested their employees to delete their twitter accounts. I expect a large amount of really shocking stuff to be released in the coming months.
Plague Doctor Who
July 22, 2020 at 20:09
It was a data breach the bitcoin side of things was a bonus. A lot of executives are now deleting their twitter accounts as we speak.
Son of Banana Jim
July 22, 2020 at 20:10
Disney is one of the companies that have requested that their execs, directors etc delete their twitter accounts. It makes you wonder what will be leaked.