Twitterati taken over by the Illuminati!
On Wednesday, the world woke up from its afternoon nap to see America's most notable twitter handles promote the very cryptocurrency mooted scandalous enough in the past years. Shocked and confused, Twitterati couldn't exactly decide on what to make out of this, given every passing day of this year has bought a bizarre headline and living in the midst of a pandemic is the new normal. Perhaps that's the reason why some mettlesome folks undauntingly tried making sense out of it and predictably fell right into the trap.
What exactly transpired?
Around 4 pm on July 15th, 2020 the twitter accounts of major companies and individuals were compromised in one of the most widespread and confounding breaches the platform has ever seen, all in service of promoting a bitcoin scam benefitting the perpetrators by over US$ 120,000. Amongst the notable names whose accounts were hacked are former US President Barack Obama, current Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden, tech giants Apple and Bill Gates and America's latest eccentric duo- rapper Kanye West and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
The handles started tweeted a link saying any bitcoin sent to the wallet will be sent back double, an offer the tweet said lasting for just 30 minutes. Naturally, users swallowed the information without any verification and in the four odd hours, the Bitcoin wallet received over US$ 120,000. It was a bad day even by Twitter standards!
What is Twitter saying about the incident?
According to Twitter support, the "coordinated social engineering attack" was executed by people who "successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools".
Clearly, the vulnerability that has been exploited was within the Twitter systems and not the user side.
Who are these hackers?
Bitcoin is extremely hard to trace and the three separate cryptocurrency wallets that the cyber criminals used have already been emptied.
There is also a possibility that the perpetrator managed to convince several staff members to go rogue by offering a financial inducement or other means.
What are the implications of this security incident?
The implications are huge given the fact that the most powerful accounts have been compromised. Twitter has been a major hub of political conversations globally and in the US particularly. Under such a scenario, a breach of this length doesn't augur well for a platform.
One notable exception in the attack was the account of President Donald Trump, whose account is speculated to have multiple protections post the 2017 fiasco.
What do we learn from this?
The incident is critical because it happened in an election year especially when last year social media was unforgettably manipulated for political gain. This event also sheds light on how social media giants could be more vulnerable than before and how we shouldn't subside our own logic to believe everything put out on the online community.
As Steven Wright rightly says, "It's like the Wild West, the Internet. There are no rules!"
