On July 15th, 2020 Twitter announced that a number of high-profile Twitter accounts had been compromised by an intelligent hacker, by way of accessing their internal tools.
Accounts breached in this attack carry extremely powerful influence, including the accounts of Kanye West, Kim Kardashian and Bill Gates, politicians Joe Biden and Barack Obama, and some of the world’s most powerful companies, including Uber, bitcoin and even Apple!
The hackers accessed these accounts so that they could tweet on their behalf, leveraging their influence to encourage followers to send a bitcoin transfer.
Within a few hours, more than $100,000 had been stolen; making this Twitter’s biggest-ever security breach.
Unlike historic breaches of social media security, it is understood that this wasn’t a complex breach of security walls, but a well-coordinated social engineering attack. Twitter announced via their official support channel that its internal systems were compromised by hackers.
“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.”
Once Twitter became aware of the unfolding situation, it “immediately locked down the affected accounts and removed Tweets posted by the attackers.” It also took the unprecedented step of disabling the ability for verified accounts to send new tweets.
So, what does this news mean for Crypto users?
In short this doesn’t really affect you if you didn’t fall prey to this scam and opt to send bitcoin.
In this particular instance, the fraud wasn’t committed as a result of an insecure structure, but rather by a socially engineered plan that managed to convince people to voluntarily send bitcoin at their own will.
Security and privacy are two of the main reasons that people invest in and trade with Cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency has become a popular and more established alternative to fiat currency, but like with everything involving money, there will always be attempts for scammers to steal.
It’s important that you always question these types of scams masked as ‘giveaways’, and only use technology that you trust.
The MuchBetter digital wallet enables users to transfer and withdraw funds using crypto currency, and the MuchBetter app is secured with multi-factor authentication. It’s impossible for money to be taken from your MuchBetter account without you authorising the transaction from your mobile device.
Any balance changes in your MuchBetter account will display instantly, so if in doubt, simply check transactions in your app.
Please note: MuchBetter would never publish a Bitcoin address to social media or ask you to send us funds in order to participate in a cash giveaway.
