Twitter was thrown into chaos on Wednesday after accounts for some of the world’s most recognizable public figures, executives and celebrities starting tweeting out links to bitcoin scams. Twitter says the attack happened because someone tricked or coerced an employee into providing access to internal Twitter administrative tools. This post is an attempt to lay out some of the timeline of this attack, and point to clues about who may have been behind it.
The first public signs of the intrusion came around 3 PM EST, when the Twitter account for the cryptocurrency exchange Binance tweeted a message saying it had partnered with “CryptoForHealth” to give back 5000 bitcoin to the community, with a link where people could donate or send money.
Minutes after that, similar tweets went out from the accounts of other cryptocurrency exchanges, and from the Twitter accounts for democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, President Barak Obama, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and investment mogul Warren Buffet.
While it may sound ridiculous that anyone would be fooled into sending bitcoin in response to these tweets, an analysis of the BTC wallet promoted by many of the hacked Twitter profiles shows that on July 15 the account processed 383 transactions and received almost 13 bitcoin on July 15 — or approximately USD $117,000.
Twitter issued a statement saying it detected “a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with acces ..
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