San Francisco: Twitter was hacked Wednesday by as yet unknown con artists in an apparent bitcoin scam. Analysts are calling it the worst ever social media attack. Twitter accounts of technology moguls, politicians, and major companies fell victim to the hack. Thereafter Twitter limited certain functionalities.
What did happen? Bogus tweets from Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg, and a number of tech billionaires including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk offered to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to a bitcoin address. Celebrities Kanye West and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, were also hacked. Among Company accounts affected were Uber and Apple
The hack was widespread and not limited in its scope but the perpetrator and the causes were as yet unknown. “This appears to be the worst hack of a major social media platform yet,” Dmitri Alperovitch, who co-founded cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, told Reuters news agency.
Twitter said in an email that it was looking into the matter and would issue a statement shortly. “We’re continuing to limit the ability to Tweet, reset your password, and some other account functionalities while we look into this,” it tweeted.
The individuals concerned or twitter tried to limit the damage and tried to remove the fake tweet, but it reappeared later as in the case of Elon Musk, the Tesla Billionaire.
The concern is how deep have the hackers penetrated. Some analysts could have access to Twitter’s internal infrastructure. Al Jazeera Quotes Michael Borohovski, director of software engineering at security company Synopsys as saying “It is highly likely that the attackers were able to hack into the back end or service layer of the Twitter application. If the hackers do have access to the backend of Twitter, or direct database access, there is nothing potentially stopping them from pilfering data in addition to using this tweet-scam as a distraction.”
Other experts said the incident has raised questions about Twitter’s cybersecurity. “It’s clear the company is not doing enough to protect itself,” said Oren Falkowitz, former CEO of Area 1 Security. Alperovitch, who now chairs the Silverado Policy Accelerator, said that, in a way, the public had dodged a bullet so far.
“We are lucky that given the power of sending out tweets from the accounts of many famous people, the only thing that the hackers have done is scammed about $110,000 in bitcoins from about 300 people,” he said.
