BITCOIN Heist 2020

On Wednesday, a lot of high profile twitter account were hijacked. The list involves the world’s movers and shakers like Tesla Owner Elon Musk, Amazon’s owner Jeff Bezos, influencer and celebrity Kim Kardashian, former U.S president Barack Obama, upcoming presidential candidate Kanye West among many others.

After around 2 hours of the first hack, twitter has taken steps to prevent further damage by preventing verified account to post any further updates. They also published a statement that users “may be unable to tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident”.

Several tweets were posted by the hackers which indicate it is a part of a coordinated scam which may be larger than it seems. The tweets were posted asking the followers to sent 1000$ (Rs 75,000) in the form of bitcoin to an anonymous account and in return, the sender will be given 2000$(Rs1,50,000). According to publicly available block-chain records, the scammers have received more than $100,000 (Rs 7,520,307) worth of cryptocurrency.

Some experts believe that these hackers may have access to Twitter’s internal infrastructure. If the hackers do have access to the back-end of the twitter, or direct database access, they might be stealing the data using this tweet-scam as a distraction.

This incident has resulted in Twitter’s stocks pummelling by 5%. It seems for now Twitter has regained control over it’s application and is in damage control mode.