A major security breach occurred on twitter on Wednesday which saw several high-profile Twitter accounts hacked. Cyber Security analysts have given a warning that the personal data belonging to the accounts targeted in the twitter hack may be compromised. The hackers used these accounts to spread a scam involving cryptocurrency. Official Twitter accounts of health organizations such as NHS, CDC, and WHO are also at the risk of being hacked.
Twitter support team believes that it was a social engineering attack by the hackers who targeted twitter staff with access to the internal tools and systems of twitter and got successful. More than 300 people were fooled by this twitter hack and sent more than 100,000 dollars to the hackers before the tweets were taken down and all the verified accounts were locked.
The accounts that were hacked included that of the former US president Barack Obama, Kim Kardashian West, Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, Warren Buffet and Mike Bloomberg, all of them were saying the same thing that they are feeling generous due to coronavirus and will pay back double in Bitcoins what the people will send to them.
These scams stating “double your Bitcoin” have been seen on Twitter for years but simultaneous hacking of actual accounts of several high-profile people on a large scale is unprecedented. So many people were scammed at the same time which implies that there is a problem with the Twitter platform itself.
The motive of this twitter hack seemed clear that the hackers thought of making what money they can and what little time they had because it was obvious that these fake tweets won’t stay there for long. It’s important to remember however that cyber-criminals are known to fill their bitcoin wallets using their own funds to make the people believe that the scam was successful.
Many angry users and law enforcement will have some questions for Twitter management as to how could this happen. A hack of this nature is not only concerning due to any financial scams but also the majority of world leaders including US President Donald Trump use twitter and make some important announcements on the social media platform. A potential hack that may take control of these accounts could have huge consequences.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said it was a tough day for all the people connected with twitter’s management. He assured the people that he and his team will share complete details when they know more about what exactly happened. Dorsey’s own twitter account was hacked last year but the mechanism due to which that hack occurred was fixed, so that mechanism has no reason to be blamed in this case.
Security experts believe that it is fortunate that the hackers were only interested in earning some bitcoins or else they could have caused mass chaos across the globe. Twitter’s share price suffered due to this hack as it went down by more than 4 percent in late trading. It has started recovering since.
While some states have been known to be involved in the hacking of social media platforms, there are suggestions that this twitter hack was the work of amateurs. This attack has revealed the flaws in twitter’s internal system which could be exploited by terrorist organizations in the future to cause chaos or even start a war.