Twitter has experienced probably one of the worst hacks

July 15, twitter has experienced probably one of the worst hacks to a social network.

Twitter hacking compromised the security of thousands of accounts on the social network to promote a Bitcoin theft scam (BTC).

Among those affected are Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Bill Gates, former U.S. President Barack Obama, Kim and Kanye West, and many others.

Exchange’s co-founder and CEO, Tyler Winklevoss, said the Gemini account had two-factor verification (2FA) enabled. However, this did not affect the efficiency of the attack and has led to the belief that the hackers had access to internal Twitter tools. Casa custodian co-founder, James Loop, claimed that the attackers had root level access to the social network.

Researchers have speculated about the addresses used by the hackers. However, they have not determined a specific reason why the attackers made the transactions to the exchanges, nor the reason behind the choice of Bitcoin addresses with an old format. In general, it appears that the attackers experimented with the addresses and transactions before they made the hit. The latter is inferred by the lack of anonymity tools used by the attackers and the more efficient options raised by members of the crypto community that would have given the attackers more profit.

Although the attackers used different addresses, the one referred to in the Whitestream tweet received most of the funds. The hackers used the old format address mentioned, “1_Ai52”. From this, the researchers were able to determine that the address belongs to wallets affiliated with exchanges BitPay and Coinbase. The attackers  used a different address with the format Bech32 to attack other Twitter accounts not related to cryptocurrencies. At the time of publication, hackers have obtained about $140,000 or 15 BTCs. In addition, researchers traced 3 transactions from this address, prior to the attack, to Coinbase and BitPay and also to the exchange CoinPayments.

Twitter has received numerous attacks in the last 24 hours. Especially, members of the crypto community have pointed out the futility of centralized systems to provide security to their users. Twitter’s response has been relatively slow, probably because of the massiveness of the attack. Twitter CEO and Bitcoin enthusiast Jack Dorsey shared the results of the initial research.

Author : Reynaldo