Numerous Twitter Accounts of prominent businessmen and politicians have become victims of a major hacker attack. The Accounts of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Tesla founder Elon Musk, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos posted within a short period of time a call to send money in the crypto currency Bitcoin with the promise of double the sum of return. In the case of Gates, it was said: “All ask me to give something back and now is the time for it. I double all payments be sent in the next 30 minutes to my Bitcoin address. You send me 1000 dollars, I will send you 2000 dollars“.
The Tweets of different Accounts have been already deleted after a short time, but a few minutes later for more Postings from well-known Accounts followed, such as those of Biden, Barack Obama, the presidential candidate of the Democrats, Joe, or the Rapper Kanye West. The official Accounts of the companies, Apple and Uber, as well as the former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg were affected .
Verified account temporarily locked
Twitter said it was a “security incident”. While hacked Accounts are not uncommon, experts were surprised by the scope and extent of the incident. “This seems to be the worst attack on a large Social Media platform,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of cyber security company CrowdStrike.
Twitter locked for more than an hour after the Occurrence of the incident, the verified accounts of Celebrities and journalists, but also by governments, politicians and heads of state for new messages, the dissemination of the fraudulent request for payment to. The users of the short message service is not to be “may be able to tweet, or password, while we review the incident and resolve,” said Twitter. It remained open, whether all of the verified user of the message service were affected by the Short, but if so, this would have a huge impact on the platform.
Biden’s campaign team was according to the matter to a familiar Person “in contact” with Twitter: The company blocked the account of the Democrats “immediately after the violation and the associated Tweet away”. Tesla and any other company concerned for an opinion not be immediately available.
Publicly available records show that the alleged fraudsters have already stolen crypto-currency to the value of more than $ 100,000. The incident raises questions about the cyber security of Twitter. “It is not clear that the company is not doing enough to protect themselves,” said Oren Falko joke, former CEO of Area 1 Security. The Bitcoin call could have only served as a distraction for an attack on the collected customer data of the company. “It is very likely that the hackers were able to penetrate in the systems of the Twitter application,” said Michael Borohovski, Director of the security company Synopsys. If the Hacker had access to the Back-End, or direct database access, preventing you there’s nothing to steal in the shadow of the Tweet-fraud in addition, data he explained.