A number of high-profile Twitter accounts were hacked on Wednesday i.e 15 July 2020 to promote a bitcoin scam. This seems to be the worst hack of an influential social media account as it includes official accounts of US President Barack Obama, politician Joseph Robinette Biden, billionaire Elon Reeve Musk, Bill Gates, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Kanye West and many others. After gaining access to these high-profile accounts, hackers asked the public to send bitcoin currency to a specific cryptocurrency wallet with a commitment that a bitcoin sent will get doubled. Also, the hackers mentioned in the tweet that this is being done to help individuals due to Covid-19 in order to gain the trust of users. Twitter claimed that 130 accounts were hacked each with millions of followers and 45 major accounts were accessed to tweet the scam messages. While these kinds of tweets like “double your Bitcoin” had previously widespread on Twitter but this is the first time where high-profile accounts like Barack Obama accounts are used to make fake tweets. Immediately after these tweets, many of the individuals sent bitcoin to the provided wallet address and over 320 transactions had already been made before Twitter took any strict action against this violation.
How did Twitter handle the situation?
Within two hours of the scam, Twitter issued a official statement that they were aware of the major account hacking and are taking immediate action to resolve the issue. Soon afterwards, Twitter removes all the tweets from the accounts. Also, it locked some of the “Verified Accounts”, for some time so that no hacker would be able to publish any tweet from those accounts. The password reset requests were also denied and other account functions were also disabled. Within three hours of the scam, Twitter announced that they have solved the security breach issue and restore the
account credentials to their rightful owners. It was informed that the scam took place by gaining access to Twitter’s administrative tool rather than through individual accounts. It was claimed that the perpetrators have gained access by either paying some money to Twitter’s employees or directly through a compromised employee account. The hacker used the tool to reset the email address, password, and other settings of the affected accounts to make it more difficult for the rightful owners to regain access. It was also stated that some of the tweets were from a member of a hacking forum i.e OG Groups (Original Gangster) and made over US $100,000 from the scam. Twitter later announced that the fraud involves social engineering and some of their employees were targeted to gain access to Twitter’s internal system and tools. Twitter also said that the investigation is going and they have allowed limited employees to access Twitter’s administrative tools in order to evaluate the situation.
How Driver and Shield help in controlling the security breaches?
Nowadays, security breaches of social accounts appear to be one of the major issues. Also, it is noticeable that if Twitter administrative tools can be hacked, then your personal social media accounts or other confidential data are also not safe. So, it becomes crucial to protect yourself and your family from cyberattacks, and here comes the role of Drivers and Shield. We offer highly-protected and reliable cybersecurity products that may control the security breaches and save your accounts, data, devices from being hacked and from other vulnerabilities. Our software like Network Privacy Shield provides absolute protection to all your devices from hackers, viruses, malware, and other scams and helps in maintaining your privacy. Once you have installed the software on your device, it will protect all your account login credentials from illegitimate access and you no longer need to worry about emerging online threats. Also, our software provides you a secure internet connection so that no one can steal your sensitive information while browsing online. The software also protects you from the harmful viruses like Trojan that can take control of your device and steal the information without your knowledge. Further, our high-performance cybersecurity products encrypt your private information into a code so that it can only be read by authorized users and cannot be hacked easily. Hence, Drivers and Shield offers you real-time threat prevention and ensures your cybersafety against online frauds like Twitter Accounts Hacked 2020.
