The message appeared late Wednesday afternoon on the Twitter account of former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate in the November U.S. presidential election. "I'm giving back to the community. All Bitcoins sent to the address below will receive double! If you send $1,000, I'll send $2,000 back. in the next 30 minutes only." At the same time, more messages like this, urging people to quickly send Bitcoin to specific addresses to get double back, are posted on the Twitter accounts of political figures - former President Barack Obama, former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, business leaders - Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Tesla boss Elon Musk, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, investor Warren Buffett, and celebrities such as Kanye West and his wife Kim Kardashian. These personalities, among the most influential in the world, were targeted Wednesday by a massive and unprecedented hacking of their Twitter accounts' cryptomonnaies. Donald Trump, a frenetic social network user, did not fall victim to the attack.
Twitter's Own Employee Tools Contributed To the Hack
Twitter said that its internal systems were compromised by the hackers, confirming theories that the attack could not have been conducted without access to the company’s own tools and employee privileges.
“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,” the first tweet in a multi-tweet explainer thread reads. “We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf.”
The messages were quickly deleted, but reappeared on some accounts. According to the specialized site Blockchain.com, which tracks transactions in cryptomoney, 12.58 bitcoins, or nearly 116,000 dollars (101,000 euros), were sent to one of the addresses mentioned in the fraudulent tweets. The problem is not a security flaw in these users with audited accounts totalling tens or even hundreds of millions of subscribers, but the administration of the Twitter platform itself, the New York Times said. Reigniting concerns about cyber security issues, especially on this social network, a veritable political megaphone, less than four months before the US presidential election. And with the precedent of the 2016 campaign well in mind. The American intelligence agencies have established that Russia coordinated cyber attacks during the last presidential election in the United States, targeting in particular the organisation of the Democratic Party. Numerous manipulations of events or groups on social networks, Facebook in the lead, were also carried out by Russian nationals.
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