Transfer me the money and he ll send you back twice as much, said Gates, Musk, Obama and Apple at the same time. It was a scam

There has never been such a scam in Twitter history. The breach of portal security meant that less attentive Internet users could lose a lot of money.

On the night of Wednesday to Thursday, the Twitter accounts of technology giants and politicians began to send their followers the same appeal to transfer bitcoins to their account. The well-known and powerful of this world promised everyone that if only the people who followed them hurry up, they would receive a double amount in response to such a transfer.

In their posts, characters such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and people allegedly maintaining official profiles of companies such as Apple and Uber, as well as many other accounts, argued that it was time to share the property with the people. Such bitcoin doubling on Twitter is, unfortunately, suspicious crap and the result of the attack.

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.

– Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 15, 2020

Twitter responded more slowly than expected.

Posts encouraging the transfer of bitcoins to receive the same amount of money were visible on profiles with millions of followers for a good few dozen minutes. Twitter at first did not delete these posts, nor did it block any further messages. It was only later that the blocking of sending messages from verified profiles and the temporary reset of the password reset option and several other functions went away.

We’re continuing to limit the ability to Tweet, reset your password, and some other account functionalities while we look into this. Thanks for your patience.

– Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 15, 2020

At first, it was suspected that someone had hacked directly into the accounts of politicians and technological magnates, as was the case with celebrities, iCloud and the infamous The Fappening, but the scale of the phenomenon has called this thesis into question. After a few hours, Twitter itself admitted that there was an attack on its infrastructure, Although the investigation is ongoing, the company shared its first conclusions.

We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.

– Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020

How was Twitter’s security breach?

The company reports that it fell victim to a "coordinated attack using social engineering," and the object of the attack was not users but employees of Tiwtter who had access to its internal tools. In this way, cyber criminals got to the tools that allowed them to gain access to many large profiles, including verified ones, to tweet on their behalf.

Once we became aware of the incident, we immediately locked down the affected accounts and removed Tweets posted by the attackers.

– Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020

Twitter is now investigating how much wrong the attackers did and how much information they had obtained before they were thrown out of the system – it is possible that since they could tweet on behalf of prominent people, they also had access to their private messages. The portal also argues that it has removed public tweets calling for sending bitcoins and blocked the possibility of posting from these profiles "immediately".

This was disruptive, but it was an important step to reduce risk. Most functionality has been restored but we may take further actions and will update you if we we do.

– Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020

Whether this was an "immediate" response, given the scale of the attack, can be argued, but people managing Twitter argue that the measures they took in the form of blocking all verified accounts were necessary and I agree with that. The portal also announced that it would hand over the profiles that were actually taken over to their owners only when it was certain that it was safe.

Internally, we’ve taken significant steps to limit access to internal systems and tools while our investigation is ongoing. More updates to come as our investigation continues.

– Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020

An attempt is now being made to detect the perpetrators of this unprecedented attack. The unofficial information Motherboard shares indicates that it was all behind a hacker signing up as Kirk, who managed to convince one of Twitter’s employees to help. He was to receive money for allowing the takeover of all these accounts, which brought allegedly 100,000 to attackers. dollars. in few hours. Given the scale of the attack, it could have been a lot worse …

Transfer me the money and he’ll send you back twice as much, ‘said Gates, Musk, Obama and Apple at the same time. It was a scam

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