…but 1st, the news. Twitter has just released an official statement on the Twitter scam around bitcoins that broke out on July 15. Here it is:
Our (Twitter) investigation is still ongoing but here’s what we know so far:
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. We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf. We’re looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed and will share more here as we have it.
Once we became aware of the incident, we immediately locked down the affected accounts and removed Tweets posted by the attackers. We also limited functionality for a much larger group of accounts, like all verified accounts (even those with no evidence of being compromised), while we continue to fully investigate this. 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 do. We have locked accounts that were compromised and will restore access to the original account owner only when we are certain we can do so securely.
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
How it happened
For those who have still not understood how the Twitter Bitcoin scam happened, here’s an explanation:
Sometime in the afternoon of July 15, Twitter followers saw tweets from the official accounts of some prominent companies & personalities such as former US President Obama, ex-VP Joe Biden, Elon Musk, & so on like the one below:
A scamster (s) had managed to somehow break into the official (blue tick) accounts of all these personalities & started asking via tweets to send bitcoin to a random cryptocurrency wallet. Double your money, it said. Which should have set off the alarm bells, but apparently it did not because some greedy folks quickly transferred the monies. By the time Twitter & everybody else realized what was happening, it was a tad late with thousands of dollars already been transferred.
Implications for Twitter
The micro-blog obviously has a major problem on hand. And yes, it’s related to the security of Twitter accounts. How had the scamsters managed to get into official accounts, to begin with? Anyway, Twitter has blocked many verified accounts from tweeting, to stave off further embarrassment, & also issued a preliminary statement on July 16, 2020.
What Twitter followers are saying
Image credit: Twitter
