Within a few hours, around $120,000 in Bitcoin was lost to a high profile Twitter accounts hack that surfaced on the handles of some American important personalities.
It first appeared like a profile account hack, however, there are indications the hacker gained entry into the internal system of Twitter and use of the opportunity to stage Bitcoin scams on reputable profiles across the network.
Several high profiled personalities like Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and many others had their Twitter account hijacked and crypto scams staged across Twitter to dupe unsuspecting users.
The crypto-influenced hack touched US presidential aspirant Joe Biden, President Barack Obama and a host of other bigwigs.
The hackers solicited that followers of those accounts deposit $1000 in a particular Bitcoin address to gain $2,000.
While the attack still went on, Twitter said its over 166 million daily users won’t have the chance of changing their passwords because the company is working on addressing the security breach.
According to Twitter, the affected accounts were locked down and also hindered verified accounts from updating their status or writing message. However, the privileges were restored after a while.
Twitter then notified that compromised account owners won’t have access to their accounts until “when we are certain we can do so securely”. US President Donald Trump’s Twitter account was among the affected accounts.
The social platform, which went through a “tough day,” said hackers who gained entry into its set-ups are behind the nefarious act.
Twitter said the hack was “a coordinated social engineering attack” by unknown elements who trickily targeted its employees. The access was used to take charge of numerous “highly-visible (including verified) accounts.”
Luckily, Twitter took the necessary steps to avert the issue and reduced the risk that would have emanated from the hack.
Account hack is a popular thing on Twitter and it can be traced to SIM swap issue.
The CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey is known for campaigning for crypto especially Bitcoin. Jack, who is also the CEO of Square, had his Twitter account hacked at some point.
Meanwhile, around $120,000 in Bitcoin (12.5 BTC) was gathered from 360 transactions, according to CoinMarketCap explorer.
The hackers have moved the funds in 10 strings of transactions, leaving a few funds in the blockchain address at the time of filing this report.
Usually, crypto exchanges corporate to monitor funds coming from crypto addresses with criminal features, and get them delivered to security operatives.
However, in cases where hackers make use of mixing services, funds become very hard to impossible to track. It is still not clear whether the funds have landed on any exchanges at the time of filing this report.
