Twitter went trending again on Wednesday, July 15, when famous personalities from technology, politics, and Hollywood became victims of the 'most remarkable Twitter hack of 2020.' Over $100,000 was stolen from tech billionaires Bill Gates and Elon Musk; joined with reality television star Kim Kardashian, and politicians like former United States President Barack Obama and Presidential candidate Joe Biden. Here's the shocking truth behind this hack.
What is 'Twitter hack'?
On Wednesday, Tech Times reported about personalities like Musk, Biden, Obama, Kardashian, and Gates were seemed to be offering a 'bitcoin' promo in their official Twitter accounts.
Their tweets were in line with the same thought: Send bitcoin to this specific bitcoin address and expect it doubled the same day. Some even quoted the pandemic victims as the official recipient of all bitcoin that will be collected. It turned out, however, that the tweets of the personalities were not true at all.
Twitter confirmed that all the personalities' accounts were compromised at the time. They even called it a "coordinated social engineering attack" that used the platform's internal system to hack the accounts.
"We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools," Twitter said on a long thread-tweet. "We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweets on their behalf."
Here's the truth though
An exact amount of $120,000 from 400 transfers was recorded due to the massive Twitter hack. People were despised by Twitter for not acting at the earliest time. And apparently, letting this one slide.
The Verge and Motherboard reported that Twitter might not have been the real victim in this story. In fact, there are errors in the system that were left unanswered by the team until now.
Reports reveal that a Twitter employee coordinated with the hackers to make the said hack. He anonymously said that the internal tool was used to change the email addresses associated with the accounts.
Twitter has not yet confirmed nor denied the claims. Another issue they are facing is the fact that the tweets were not immediately pulled out of the internet since they discovered the hack.
Dan Guido, CEO of security company Trail of Bits, said on Independent UK, that Twitter took almost five hours to fix the issue though it could be done for a faster time-- making it more suspicious.
"Twitter's response to this hack was astonishing. It's the middle of the day in San Francisco, and it takes them five hours to get a handle on the incident," said Dan Guido, CEO of security company Trail of Bits.
For now, Twitter's co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey clarified that they're doing their best to solve the issues.
Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.
We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.
to our teammates working hard to make this right. — jack (@jack) July 16, 2020
