Hackers compromise high profile accounts to promote bitcoin scam

Twitter has told that cybercriminals attacked high-profile accounts to promote their scams via those accounts. 

It is one of the greatest cyberattacks of the recent pandemic era where the scammers have successfully managed to bypass the social media giant Twitter's security system (claimed by Twitter).

The victims of these attacks also include the Joe Biden strong candidate for the upcoming US presidential election and the former US president Brack Obama.

The timing of the recent wave of cyberattacks is raising many questions over the possible manipulation of Twitter to affect the US elections. Therefore, the timing of the attack is more severe than these attacks.

In every election, the different agencies allegedly try to stigmatize the candidates to affect the election. These attacks might also be an example of such attacks.

But on the other hand, the nature of this attack shows that the attackers have no concern with this election. It seems as if they only want to loot the money from people by promoting different scams on high profile Twitter accounts.

According to the screenshot shared by TechCrunch, the hackers send tweets from these accounts. The hackers promote their scam by sharing their bitcoin wallet address and announce that they will double up money and send back to you during this tense situation of Covid-19. 

The wave of this attack started by attacking the cryptocurrency-related twitter accounts such as @bitcoin, @coinbase, and @behance, etc. But, they didn't leave the other high profile accounts.

After this, the twitter accounts of Joe Biden, Brack Obama, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos. Warren Buffet, Apple, Uber, Mike Bloomberg, and Apple were also no exception. The attackers shared the same kind of scams on these Twitter accounts.

Attackers not only post these tweets these accounts but also pinned this scammy tweet on the top of the profiles. 

Twitter has claimed that this kind of attack was only possible with the help of any official employee. 

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 Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020

 The Motherboard is claiming that it was possible with the help of the twitter utility software that is used by the company itself.  Scammers have received that utility software by offered the bribe to the employee of Twitter. 

However, Twitter has responded to these attacks very quickly and resolved the issue.