On Wednesday, MAY 15th, Twitter surely experienced one of
the most phenomenal hacks. Dozens of famous people and famous companies'
certified accounts have been effectively hacked. Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff
Bezos, and many other celebrities and corporate clients were victims of this
attack.
An incident that affects many victims
The first account was hit around 10:27 p.m., that of Elon Musk, the head of the famous companies Tesla and SpaceX. Using the victim's account, the hackers published a tweet that registered a BTC address.
A few minutes later, other certified accounts began posting tweets with roughly similar content. Most of the time, the goal of a cyber attack is to make money, and that is exactly the case with this massive Twitter hack. Most of the hacked accounts requested a $ 1,000 transaction at the given BTC address. In return, the hacked account promises to pay whoever carries out a transaction double the amount.
Some content was only posted for a few seconds, but thanks to the influence of the accounts, many Twitter users fell into the trap.
This type of scam is common on social media, but what made it special was its diversity and the impact of victims on users.
The main consequences
In this attack, the hackers would not target personalities on a case-by-case basis, but would instead target the Twitter database. The platform's contingency measures after these hacks were to disable the right to tweet and change passwords for certified users.
Although each tweet was only published for a few seconds, the perpetrators managed to collect a considerable sum. The blockchain site, a specialist in monitoring cryptocurrency transactions, confirmed this financial result. In fact, according to the website, 300 transactions weren't counted until 11pm. These operations grossed more than $ 100,000 for hackers in 30 minutes.
However, the extent of the attack is more spectacular than financial. According to the blockchain site, the cyber criminals were simply trying to make a quick profit.
For Twitter, the most important consequence after this operation will be that user trust will decline. On the financial side, the company is currently seeing its share price fall 3.25% after restricting access to issuing certain certified accounts.
Twitter employees should be in business
After this series of hackers, statements have already been made: The source of the incident is said to have been one or more employees on Twitter. The cause of the act is therefore not a technical or security error, but a question of complicity with certain employees who work on the platform. The latter have access to control panels that give them access to internal tools. Because of this, the hackers managed to recover the details of the fake accounts. They even managed to change the recovery email addresses for those accounts.
Meanwhile, Twitter support has already confirmed this fact by stating that the incident was a coordinated technology attack. At the moment, the social network is still checking whether the employee carried out the hack himself or whether he gave the hackers access.
