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The attack announced one account at a time. Elon Musk. Kanye West. Bill Gates. Joe Biden. Barack Obama In the area of a few minutes on Wednesday, some of the largest social media users posted almost the same messages requesting that bitcoin bills with a refund be offered twice as expensive.
As more and more giant accounts came into play (Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Apple), it temporarily became transparent that tweets were components of a coordinated attack, though it is not transparent who it was, how it was perpetrated or not. if it had a goal beyond defrauding some gullduus Twitter users out of the cryptocurrency.
By the late afternoon, when the scam had already extracted more than $100,000 in cryptocurrencies, Twitter decided that the only way to protect its maximum vital users was to silence them, at least temporarily. “We are aware of a security incident affecting Twitter accounts,” the company tweeted. “We are investigating and taking steps to deal with it.”
Among those steps, block verified user accounts, an organization that includes the maximum of celebrities, news organizations, and major brands, to tweet.
Social media has been noted as a perfect equalizer, a tool that does not provide anyone with the kind of transmission force that was once limited to sports presidents and stars. In fact, the fame of the Internet has basically served to magnify the voices of the already famous.
But the two hours before Twitter restored tweeting privileges on so-called blue ticks (the badge indicating that an account was verified), the deadlines belonged to small people. Meanwhile, big accounts like NBC News, along with millions of people close by, had to tweet from the election or transitory handles to cover the hack’s history.
Twitter, which saw its shares fall to 3.8% after the market closed, blamed “a coordinated social engineering attack through other people who controlled some of our workers with internal systems and tools.”
“A difficult day for us on Twitter,” leader Jack Dorsey tweeted. “We all feel terrible that this has happened.”
“This is one of the biggest high-level account hacks on a single day I can remember,” said Theresa Payton, a leading former white house data officer and now CEO of Fortalice Solutions, a cybersecurity consulting firm.
“The question is whether these are internal charts or whether they are complicated cyber operators, perhaps country states, that took credit for Twitter’s authorization.” Payton says.
The effect on Twitter’s reputation will feature the company’s tracking, he said. In addition to refunding anyone who has been a victim of bitcoin fraud, Payton said the company owed a full investigation to other people whose accounts had been hacked, adding that Bitcoin scam messages may be the apparent maximum sign of malicious activity.
They also serve as a wake-up call. “If today had taken a position a week before the presidential election and the bills of Bill Gates, Barack Obama and Joe Biden had been taken over and said something absolutely outrageous, it may have had an effect on the psyche of the electorate going to the polls,” Payton said. “If the tsunami bell wasn’t activated today for all social platforms and political campaigns, I don’t know what it will be.”
Twitter users have already been hacked, but have taken the form of large-scale knowledge leaks or high-level individual account replays.
A 2013 hack allowed attackers to access the email addresses and usernames of 250,000 users, and in 2016, the media reported that 32 million login data had been hacked and posted online, however, the accuracy of disputed knowledge.
Hacks targeting giant accounts have also affected the site over the years. In 2011, Fox News’s Twitter account was recovered to tweet fake news that President Obama had been killed, the British PayPal account hacked and the profile picture replaced by a lot of excrement, and the hackers took the NBC News account to tweet fake news. of a plane crash at Ground Zero in Manhattan.
Similar tricks occurred in 2013, when Burger King and Jeep accounts were taken to tweet that were acquired through McDonald’s and Cadillac, respectively. That year, Twitter added two-factor authentication, which calls users to determine their identity with a phone number.
While the move toward the security of the accounts that allowed it, the hackers were able to take the account of U.S. Central Military Command. In 2015, they tweeted messages from the pro-Islamic state and recommended that they have access to army documents and personal data about army personnel.
After a primary attack on the knowledge of LinkedIn users in 2016, the attackers used the data to take the accounts of celebrities such as Mark Zuckerberg and Kylie Jenner. And in 2017, several leading Twitter accounts, including Duke University, Forbes and Amnesty International, were selected to tweet a swastika-containing message and a Turkish message accusing the Dutch of being Nazis.
The high-profile trick in recent reminiscence took place in the summer of 2019, when Dorsey’s account was recovered and used to retwite pro-Nazi and hacking-related tweets.
Twitter has also faced a number of hacks related to cryptocurrencies. In 2017, John McAfee, a debatable antivirus and cryptocurrency entrepreneur, had his account hacked and used to advertise hard-to-understand cryptocurrencies, and in 2018, hackers took Target’s Twitter account to tweet a Bitcoin scam message similar to that deployed Wednesday.
In 2017, a contractor in Twitter’s Trust and Security department used his access to briefly deactivate President Trump’s non-public account. After restoring Trump’s account, Twitter said it had put in place more safeguards “to prevent this from falling again.” Trump’s account is not among those compromised in Wednesday’s attack.