New information has come about the latest bitcoin hack involving some of the world’s most high-profile Twitter accounts. Now, the social media giant is saying that as many as eight separate accounts had all their information downloaded by the hijackers.New Information Regarding Twitter Hack Has Come AboutThe attack occurred on Wednesday of this week. Politicians, actors and other well-known celebrities had their social media accounts hacked for the purpose of obtaining bitcoin from unsuspecting victims. Many of the account owners – including Bill Gates, Elon Musk, former president Barack Obama and his vice president Joe Biden – were believed to have put out messages to their followers saying that if they forwarded bitcoin to anonymous addresses, they would have their money doubled.Little
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New information has come about the latest bitcoin hack involving some of the world’s most high-profile Twitter accounts. Now, the social media giant is saying that as many as eight separate accounts had all their information downloaded by the hijackers.
New Information Regarding Twitter Hack Has Come About
The attack occurred on Wednesday of this week. Politicians, actors and other well-known celebrities had their social media accounts hacked for the purpose of obtaining bitcoin from unsuspecting victims. Many of the account owners – including Bill Gates, Elon Musk, former president Barack Obama and his vice president Joe Biden – were believed to have put out messages to their followers saying that if they forwarded bitcoin to anonymous addresses, they would have their money doubled.
Little did people suspect that these messages were not coming from the figures themselves but from individuals that had overtaken their accounts. Their goal was clearly to steal as much bitcoin as they could.
The good news is that the final tally has remained relatively small. $121,000 in BTC appears to have been stolen by the hackers, which is a low number compared to some of the other high-profile cyberattacks that have marred the cryptocurrency space in the past few years. Still, this does put a nasty dent in bitcoin’s reputation… And in Twitter’s.
Is a giant social media venture such as Twitter really that vulnerable? Why were stronger security measures not set in place? The company says that as many as 130 accounts were hacked, though only a “small subset” did anything.
The company also put out the following blog post which reads:
As of now, we know that they accessed tools only available to our internal support teams to target 130 Twitter accounts. For 45 of those accounts, the attackers were able to initiate a password reset, login to the account, and send tweets.
The message suggests that the hackers had gained access to tools that were only available to workers associated with Twitter. This has got some people questioning if this was an inside job. Twitter was quick to try and cover its tracks, explaining:
The attackers successfully manipulated a small number of employees and used their credentials to access Twitter’s internal systems, including getting through our two-factor protections.
Was This an Inside Job?
However, these words do little to fully calm the mind. What does “manipulated a small number of employees” mean? Motherboard suggests that perhaps the hackers paid a Twitter employee for access to the compromised accounts.
Of the 130 accounts that were overtaken by the malicious actors, as many as eight separate accounts had all their data downloaded. The company is claiming that these accounts were not verified. This suggests that they were not of the same high-profile status as some of the others that tweeted the bitcoin scam to users, though they were popular, nonetheless.