Who hacked Twitter and staged attack on Bitcoin? Was Trump involved and have they earned over $43,000?
Who hacked all the blue-checked and verified Twitter accounts? In a major scam, several high-profile celebrities — including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Apple, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian and billionaire Mike Bloomberg — and others were targeted. The official Twitter accounts were hacked and the email addresses associated with the accounts were also changed to make it harder for the real users to regain access.
There was one common thread among all tweets posted from the hacked accounts: they all wanted followers to send bitcoin to a specific address. The widespread racket affected numerous major companies and if a Motherboard report is to be believed, many underground hacking circles have been sharing screenshots of an internal Twitter administration tool allegedly used to take over the high-profile verified accounts. The microblogging platform, however, is removing images of the screenshot from its platform and suspending users who continue to share it. As of now, the company has not shared any details of how the hacks were carried out.
NBC reporter Kevin Collier posted, "Whoever hacked all these twitter accounts has already made $43k and counting, wild. As a rule y'all, you shouldn't ever wire money to a celeb who promises they'll double it." In his long thread, he also wrote: "This BTC address alone just jumped past $100k, right after popping @kanyewest. Never seen a scam quite like this." His next tweet said, "I'm less surprised that Twitter had this kind of vulnerability (or whatever's at play here), more that this many people are so dumb as to fall for this."
Sharing a screenshot as proof, he wrote, "Couple hours and $118,000 later, and the scammers have almost entirely cashed out." Another Twitter user pointed out: "They've made a heck of a lot more than that, friend. The cumulative gain is over 100,000 USD at this point." He then responded: "I'm just looking at the BTC address tweeted by Gates and Musk's accounts. You seeing others?"
Anti-feminist political commentator and conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich posted, "Who is responsible for the hacking?" In no time, his tweet collected over 1,700 likes and people couldn't stop wondering who had done the deed. Multiple theories are floating on social media. "The highly sophisticated Nigerians of course," one tweet read and another said, "Unsure. First instinct would be North Korean operatives or Iranians in response to all the weirdness going on over there. I'm also not certain individual accounts are being hacked. It looks more like they have hacked Twitter itself and can post to / as any account they want to." "The Twitter API got hacked. Twitter should focus more on security instead of banning accounts like Stefan Molyneux," one tweet read and another said, "Twitter... And they will use it to blame Trump... Then ban him completely.... This is a too well-organized attack."
What's more, many couldn't stop wondering if US President Donald Trump had a hand in it. "Why wasn't Trump hacked? Could it be a warning from one of his enemies?" one wrote and another said, "Want to know why Trump's Twitter account hasn't been compromised? Because Trump is the one who hacked Twitter so people would stop talking about his amazing Covid winning streak."
Many started imagining umpteen possibilities that could happen. "Imagine if this happened the night before the election and the goal wasn't to fill up a Bitcoin wallet," one tweet read and another said, "Imagine if they'd hacked Trump's Twitter account, and used the account to declare war on China. Who would know that it wasn't Trump creating policy via tweet as usual for him? Hackers could have started WWIII." One tweet read: "With all this hacking going on today I wonder what bombshell data we can expect for the upcoming election? Systems have never been easier to hack because everything has government backdoors now. I can tell you from experience the US government has no clue about data security."
There is no clear indication of who was actually involved and we may have to wait for concrete proof. MEA WorldWide (MEAWW) does not support and cannot independently verify the claims being made on the Internet.