To lure victims into various scams using fake or hacked accounts of high-profile celebrities and brands has always been an old trait of cybercriminals. But this time, a massive coordinated attack that was executed on the Twitter accounts could be called the worst hack executed on a social media platform till date.
By hijacking the Twitter accounts of a large number of high-profile celebrities and brands and abusing them in a coordinated manner to promote the scam within a duration of a few hours, some hackers have taken cryptocurrency scams to a whole new level.
Close to 130 Twitter accounts belonging to several high-profile celebrities, businessmen, and organizations, were abused for promoting a bitcoin giveaway scam, earlier this month on the 15th of July 2020.
A post on the Bill Gate’s Twitter account was promising a return of $2000 upon payment of $1,000 on providing bitcoin address. While accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kanye West were seen requesting donations in the form of cryptocurrency. Elon Musk’s account also had a tweet promising to pay double any Bitcoin payment sent to the address of his digital wallet “for the next 30 minutes”. Several other celebrities had similar scam stories.
In entire probability, the attackers must have gained access to Twitter’s Internal Administrative tool, by some or other social engineering techniques through which they were able to bypass all security layers and post tweets directly. They managed to collect around 12 BTC via more than 320 transactions on one of the associated wallet addresses within a few minutes of posting the tweets, with this scam in a matter of hours.
Difficult times for Twitter
Earlier this year, Twitter sent emails to its business clients informing them about the data breach incident which may have exposed the personal and financial information of some of its clients.
Other Bitcoin Scams in recent times
Hackers were seen using Bitcoin vanity addresses to create fraudulent accounts with brands associated with Elon Musk in June this year. Through this scam, they were able to make around 214 Bitcoins (or $2 Million) in the past two months.
To read more, please check eScan Blog
