The Great Hack – Twitter Edition

The huge news of the day was that twitter accounts of many personalities especially in the United States were hacked. And this time the hackers used this with the Bitcoin scam to rob various individuals around the globe. Amongst accounts that were hacked include former US President Barack Obama, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Kanye West the rapper, and his wife Kim Kardashian, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, US President candidate Joe Biden, and also some brands official accounts such as Uber and Apple.

What Was The Hack?

Official Twitter accounts of various personalities were hacked and a tweet was made from their accounts asking the readers to pay them $1,000 and in return, they would be paid back $2,000. Also that they are doing this just for the next 30 minutes and they were doing so as they wanted to “contribute to the society” or “giving back to the society”.

Accounts Hacked

The list of Accounts that have been hacked are:

• Apple
• Elon Musk
• Bloomberg
• Cashapp
• Joe Biden
• Kanye West
• Jeff Bezos
• Bill Gates
• Barack Obama
• Warren Buffett
• Uber
• Tron
• Justin Sun
• Bitcoin
• Coinbase
• BINANCE
• CZ_Binance
• Gemini
• Kucoin
• Gate.io
• Coindesk
• Charlee Lee
• Benjamin Netanyahu
• Twitter Support

Who Is Behind The Hack?

All of these tweets were tracked to contain one of the three Bitcoin addresses and it was then later tracked belonging to an organization named CryptoForHealth. It was also reported that on Instagram there is an account of the organization whose description it says “It was us”, hinting they are the one behind the hack.

There is also a report on BBC which states that the web address behind many of the tweets has been tracked down to be of a user with an Email ID ‘mkworth5@gmail.com’. The user of the account has been reported to be ‘Anthony Elias’. But it is still unknown if this is the person actually behind the hack or is it just some alias.

How Much Money Has Been Duped?

Using the Bitcoin address, all the transactions have been tracked and it is reported that about 373 transactions have been made in all. The amount of money has been estimated to be 12.86252562 Bitcoins which has been estimated to be about $118,300 (approx Rs. 89 lakhs).

It was also reported by Bloomberg that more than half of this amount has been transferred to other Bitcoin accounts making it very difficult to track it back to the people behind it. Most of the money has been reported to be from users in The United States, followed by some from Europe and the remaining from Asia.

Twitter’s Investigation And Response

Despite the breach in their security, Twitter was very quick to acknowledge it and start taking steps to rectify it. Twitter briefly blocked accounts of all verified personalities (Blue Tick Accounts) to control the damage and investigate into the matter. Many of the hacked user’s accounts are still locked by twitter as they are being investigated.

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 has also said that they are investigating the matter and believe that the hack was a “coordinated social engineering attack targeting some of their employees”.

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.

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

– Twitter (Regarding the Investigation)

A report in Vice claims that a Twitter ‘Insider’ is responsible for the hack. It also said that a source for Vice said “We used a rep that literally done all the work for us”. Several authorities are involved in investigating the ‘Twitter Hack’.