Twitter Accounts Hacked or Twitter Hacked ? Twitter Bitcoins Scam 2020

[BlackHat]

To discuss about Twitter Bitcoins Scam happened yesterday - 15-07-2020 

BTC Address of Hacker -- https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/bc1qxy2kgdygjrsqtzq2n0yrf2493p83kkfjhx0wlh 
though after the Total Hack, Hacker was able to garnered around 10 Millions ++ USD

News Covered by BBC -- https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53425822
The Verge - https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/15/21326200/elon-musk-bill-gates-twitter-hack-bitcoin-scam-compromised

Few Hacked Accounts I saw -
 

1- Apple Official - iPhone Owner Official LOL
2- Twitter Support - Haha Official Account 
3- Bill Gates - LOL No Need Description
4- Barack Obama - ex President of USA
5- Elon Musk - Well Known 7th Richest Person and Tesla SpaceX CEO
6- Mike Bloomberg - Billionaire Media Owner
7- Cashapp
8- kanye West - May be standing for Election and Famous Singer
9- Jeff Bezos - No. 1 in the List of rich and Ofcourse Amazon Owner
10- Benjamin Netanyahu
11- Uber
12- Tron
13- Coinbase
14- Bitcoin
15- BINANCE
16- Charlee Lee
17- Joe Biden
18- Justin Sun
19- Warren Buffett
20- Ripple

and almost all CEOs and Crypto Companies, Payments Site 
 
 Luckily I didn't see Mark Zuckerberg in the List.

They targeted almost all big accounts on twitter. 
Its the most astonishing news I saw and i think probably 2nd biggest news after Corona in this 2020.

what is your opinion guys? Let's discuss about it. 

1 Million Bounty announced for White Hat by Justin Sun -- https://cointelegraph.com/news/justin-sun-offers-1-million-bounty-in-exchange-for-twitter-hackers

 

Edited July 16, 2020 by BlackHat

[atom0s]

Current rumor around it is that one of Twitters top developers who had access to certain control panels and tools was "hacked".

[Kurapica]

Sounds too good to be a "pure" hack, I think it's an inside job just like atom0s mentioned.

[atom0s]

Twitter released a statement earlier saying that it was a targeted social engineering attack:

Quote

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.

 

[whoknows]

^with shots 

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/scammers-hacked-twitter-and-hijacked-accounts-using-admin-tool/

 

[Loki]

Amazes me that with that power they went for a bitcoin scam..... imagine what they could have got by shorting Tesla and Apple stock. Less traceable this way I guess, and they still made some cash.

[Teddy Rogers]

2 hours ago, Loki said:

Amazes me that with that power they went for a bitcoin scam

That was the first thing that came to my mind at the time I found out about this. They could have been a lot stealthier about how they used this...

Quote

Once again, social engineering has been demonstrated to be a powerful attack vector. Who would fall for such a ruse, you may ask? Looking at the traffic on said Bitcoin address, more than 100 people were duped.

https://blog.malwarebytes.com/social-engineering/2020/07/coordinated-twitter-attack-rakes-in-100-grand/

Ted.

[Sangavi]

2 hours ago, Loki said:

imagine what they could have got by shorting Tesla and Apple stock.

How would they be able to short the short using just the twitter accounts and make money? By spreading rumors? Problem would be that such profits (due to fraud) would be reversed by the stock exchanges at a later date.

Same with banks. Fraudulent transactions are liable to be reversed at a later date.

What they did with the BitCoin is quite smart. Not easily traceable and also impossible to reverse after 3-6 confirmations.

[Kurapica]

@Sangavi

yeah spreading rumors seems to be a popular hobby these days

[Marcus]

I hope it was all Apple die hard fans which got scammed because ain't nobody gives a shit bout them flexing there new iphone 20 with camera and screen sold separately at 10k in total, tbh if it was I'd laugh so hard it would shake the whole world so much it'll be documented as a 10+ in a seismograph.

[Progman]

Who said they would have to short to make money.  Short sale profits are much more suspicious.  They could just buy the stock, announce all sorts of amazing good news about new contracts and profits and stuff and then get out.  And normal buying and selling is much harder to deem as fraudulent.  Chances are in a few hours, its not going to be the most profitable scheme though, without investing a huge principal amount.

Coulda shorted Twitter stock itself though regardless of what method they used - its the one that was going down no matter what.

I saw a news article that the attack was part of a group which I recall was called "Team Irish Republican Army" whose lead by an alias of the "Lord of Technological Trolling" - so these actors were very likely behind this bitcoin scam.  Unfortunately the news article was deleted shortly after it went up, don't know what happened.  Twitter has figured everything out already it seems as their idea to implement a watermark based session scheme in their admin tools which was not successfully removed lets them exactly id a admin who was compromised.  Otherwise would expect more scattered rays of postings to come.

[whoknows]

Quote

They accessed tools only available to our internal support teams to target 130 Twitter accounts. For 45 of those accounts, the attackers were able to initiate a password reset, login to the account, and send Tweets.

 

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/an-update-on-our-security-incident.html

 

[Sangavi]

Shorting stocks or going long is fine. It would certainly put them under the radar of law enforcement.

I heard that the IMS company injected some code and tried to mold the code to their configuration but the mess flipped into their faces. 😁

[Loki]

On 7/17/2020 at 1:50 PM, Sangavi said:

How would they be able to short the short using just the twitter accounts and make money? By spreading rumors? Problem would be that such profits (due to fraud) would be reversed by the stock exchanges at a later date.

Something like that.... Elon's account came to mind. A simple "fornication Tesla, been a good run, administrators are circling" would have done the job given his ability to wipe billions with a tweet.

Then get a few friends to buy stock when it has dropped... spreads the risk around and no doubt many other people not even involved in the hack might take the risk too. That one account hack would probably go down as a password compromise rather than full twitter breach so you pick another target and repeat.

But I agree, if you just want 100k and then retire, its probably a smarter move what they did.

[atom0s]

For things like that with Elons account, it would raise red flags before people would react out of fear. After issues in his past over the last handful of years, he's not allowed to Tweet things about Tesla/Tesla stock without a panel review now. So if he suddenly shotgunned out weird Tweets about the company/it's stock, it would be met with instant/immediate red flags of him being hacked. Wouldn't really do much damage and would get Twitters attention from his company and board faster than the Bitcoin Tweets would have since those are actually believable to some extent. Especially with people like Elon.

Given the way the breech happened and was done via password resets, the people behind the attack knew they only had a limited amount of time to do something/anything before one of the people affected would begin reporting their account hacked/stolen to Twitter. So the bitcoin idea was honestly their best bet to make out with some easy money and keep a somewhat believable message up across multiple high-figure celebs accounts for the longest time possible.

 

[whoknows]

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/07/on_the_twitter_.html

bonus - stackoverrun.com

Edited July 20, 2020 by whoknows

[whoknows]

Twitter hack: Exchange 'blocked 1,000 Bitcoin transactions'

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53485170

[Progman]

Yea it was basically unsuccessful and not as planned out as it should have been.  That admin tool access could have been patiently studied and waited on.  Bigger fireworks then.  Disappointing maybe the hackers were just showing off.

 

Edited July 22, 2020 by Loki
Please keep comments on topic

[Sangavi]

 

I am 100% sure that the ever-vigilant mods would remove this post, 🤣 

Edited July 22, 2020 by Loki
Correct - but only because I have no desire to read about playground spats in the forum.

[Loki]

Gents. Please keep conversation on topic. There is no reason to bring personal vendettas up over and over.

Thank you.

[Kurapica]

@Loki  Please remove any member using fake accounts, we all know whom I mean, he is the source of all troubles here.

[Progman]

Sorry to let things go OT, but today I did see the truths everywhere and a lot of info right from the horse's mouth.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/technology/twitter-hackers-interview.html

Hope they used a VPN

[whoknows]

Hackers stole Twitter employee credentials via phone phishing

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-stole-twitter-employee-credentials-via-phone-phishing/

 

[Teddy Rogers]

Tampa teenager and two others arrested for Twitter Bitcoin hack

https://www.engadget.com/teenager-arrested-twitter-bitcoin-hack-183302700.html

Ted.

[whoknows]

+ https://www.foxla.com/news/tampa-teen-faces-30-felony-charges-for-hacking-prominent-twitter-accounts-2-others-charged