The recent Twitter scam has once again raised the eyebrow of Twitter users along with the whole cryptocurrency community. The nefarious attack has made experts and naïve crypto users to delve into financial literacy.
Besides Twitter accounts breach, cybersecurity experts have also started to show concerns and probing on the social media network’s internal security procedures which are considered as a broad responsibility towards its users.
On July 15, well-known Twitter accounts have been compromised included big crypto industry names- Justin Sun, Charlie Lee, King Cobie, AngeloBTC, Binance, Coinbase, Gemini, Bitfinex,@Bitcoin, Kucoin, and CoinDesk are among others out of the high-ranked political personalities worldwide including Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, George Wallace, Wiz Khalifa, Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg, and Barack Obama.
The hackers while targeting these accounts started to send phishing messages and scam tweeting via breached accounts on Bitcoin (BTC) giveaway to grab BTC from Twitter users. As per the reports, almost over 13 to 15 BTC has been tapped from the victims in a wild scam within just a few minutes of the breach.
Experts Posing Questions on Crypto Twitter Safety
According to the experts, the worst scenario could happen if Twitter does not organize and sort out security-related issues. The coordinated Twitter attack has arisen the need for serious security measures to duck further grave consequences.
Reportedly, from a malware lab Emsisoft, threat analyst, Brett Callow mentioned that only following safety measures by Twitter won’t be enough and such incidences may transpire again in the future, probably not on the same scale. As such, there is no complete solution to preclude these similar cybercrime incidents. Callow said.
According to James Carder from LogRhytm Labs, vice president, and chief security officer in the company believes that hackers are using the Covid-19 pandemic as a tool to exploit people via crypto hacks. This uncertain time is likely increasing financial insecurity worldwide and hackers are quickly taking advantage of it.
The deep evaluation is required by the cybersecurity experts on how the attack became possible and how to prevent them. Carder further mentioned the urgency to strengthen social media platforms’ privacy to stop the hacks happen in the future.
“This hack also brings into concern why — in the first place — Twitter granted its employees with the functionality to tweet on behalf of their customers. It is clear that social media organizations need the ability to manage accounts, and particularly the ability to take down offensive or inappropriate content, the employees should not have access to post a unique Tweet on a user’s behalf. This points to a likely case of too much functionality available in the platform and not enough robust controls.” media reports cited while referencing Carder’s statement.
On July 18, Tom Robinson, Chief Scientist & Co-founder at Elliptic tweeted “Bitcoins have just started to move again” and … “Simultaneous movement of funds from two wallets that have received the hacker’s bitcoins suggests they’re still under the control of one person.”
For the donation, the bitcoin address which the hackers used is bc1qxy2kgdygjrsqtzq2n0yrf2493p83kkfjhx0wlh.
The reports suggest that the hackers are not sophisticated Bitcoin users and using the same bitcoin addresses to move their funds. The hackers have also left the trails of transferring, moving, or mixing their funds to different accounts which can be traced by deploying high-tech blockchain tools.
Earlier Robinson also mentioned Elliptic’s new security blockchain tool which can aid the cryptocurrency exchanges and companies to catch-hold the hackers’ addresses.
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