Greatest Twitter Hack In History Amounts To A Dumb Bitcoin Scam
Hackers took control yesterday of various Twitter accounts including those of Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Warren Buffett, Apple, Kanye West, and Jeff Bezos. It's not yet clear who exactly these hackers were, but we do know they were able to utilize Twitter's own internal employee tools to carry out the hack, meaning that there was either an inside man involved at Twitter or that these hackers were skilled enough to hijack the accounts of cyber professionals. Either way, some unknown entity had (and might still have) the proverbial voice box of the most powerful people in the world all at once and used that power ... to run a bitcoin scam that made about $120,000.
I can't overstate how much power these hackers had at their fingertips, yet I can't understate how dumb you'd have to be to both fall for this bitcoin scam and to actually run it. It's the type of scam thirteen-year-old kids would pull on Runescape. Here's Elon Musk's tweet:
"You send $1000, and I'll send you $2000 back!" It's a classic. The only thing more transparent would be "I'm an admin and your account information has been compromised. Please chat with us in this private forum and send us your password one letter at a time like this - p a s s..."
Dmitri Alperovitch, who co-founded the cyber-security company CrowdStrike, has called this "the worst hack of a major social media platform yet." It's basically like if SPECTRE infiltrated MI6 to settle their parking violations. I mean these hackers could have caused an international incident or tanked the economy or started a war. They could have had Joe Biden call Vladamir Putin a shitweasel. They could have made Jeff Bezos promise to blow up the moon. You want to make more money than $120,000? Hack Warren Buffett's account and say you're running an Onlyfans.
Ah, well. A wasted opportunity for supervillains everywhere, but a decent payday of $120,000 I guess. Maybe it'll be enough to keep them going as they hide from the FBI for the rest of their lives.
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Top Image: Pe3k/Shutterstock
