MAJOR TWITTER HACK: High-Profile Accounts Affected In BTC Scam

A major Twitter hack has occurred, compromising several high-profile accounts including Jeff Bezos, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, and Apple for starters, in a Bitcoin giveaway scam as we are reading further in our Bitcoin scam news.

Dozens of businesses and celebrities were heavily impacted in the unprecedented, major twitter hack as the hackers used their account addresses to advertise a Bitcoin giveaway scam. The CryptoForHealth scam affected about 20 celebrities and a lot of corporate accounts on Twitter, as the tweets from compromised accounts invited users to donate in a Bitcoin giveaway offer. Politicians and celebrities were victimized in a larger-scale phishing campaign with hackers scamming people for over $100,000 in BTC.

Hackers used their addresses and made people take participate in a fake BTC giveaway as the attack targeted many crypto-related accounts. The list of victims includes Coinbase, Kraken, Bitcoin, Binance, TRON Foundation, Ripple, Gemini, KuCoin, Vitalik Buterin, Justin Sun, Bitfinex, Charlie Lee, and Changpeng Zhao. Corporate accounts that were affected include Bloomberg, Uber, Square CashApp, and Apple. The accounts deleted the phishing tweets later and continued operating as usual.

Twitter didn’t explain the attack but it seems that the employee panel was accessed by the attacker which gave them access to each account. The attacker gained access by using Twitter’s employee login credentials on the black market. Twitter started to limit account activity on its platform by restricting some users from tweeting. It’s possible that the platform was hacked directly but the intermediary service in which automated posts could have also been compromised which could give the attacker only partial access to accounts. The CryptoForHealth domain is registered in California but this is likely fake information possibly purchased on the black market.

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

The attacker’s bitcoin address received more than 12.8 BTC in a few hours and usually, phishing campaigns do not go through the trouble of hacking accounts directly. They rely on nearly-identical but a few accounts that post fraudulent giveaway offers. The verified accounts as well as their limited reach made the impersonating of high-profile accounts ineffective. Today’s attack was successful but dozens of scams on Twitter and YouTube brought millions worth of Bitcoin. The hack of today doesn’t seem to be profitable compared to other scams.