Wednesday, July 15 was one of the worst days in Twitter history when a small group of young hackers took over some very important and large accounts like Elon Musk (36.9M followers), Jeff Bezos (1.5M), Brack Obama (120M), and Joe Biden (7M) to name a few among 130 accounts admitted by Twitter.
According to Twitter’s blog post on this incident, the hackers were able to reset the password of these influential accounts, logged in an posted the bitcoin scam message from the verified accounts, this attempt trapped a small percentage of the followers, the message looked like the following screenshot of its archive from Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s account:
This organized large-scale hacking of the social media platform raised concerns among the Twitter users but the Silicon Valley tech company says it’s committed to improving the overall security and a forensic investigation is ongoing, an excerpt from their blog post reads:
We’re embarrassed, we’re disappointed, and more than anything, we’re sorry.
Twitter Blog
The New York Times journalists were reached by the hackers who played the major role in this historical hack and according to the news outlet’s information, the main character who goes by the web moniker ‘Kirk’ reportedly made 20 BTC which is equal to ~$180,000+ as of today, as the hackers were young and not part of a bigger gang they relied on this petty amount, things would’ve been scarier if the stock market was crashed with the likes of Elon Musk and Warren Buffet on the list.
According to a Cyber Security expert Brian Krebs, these hackers were able to gain access to Twitter’s internal admin tools that only the company’s employees are admitted to use, one of the involved hackers even tweeted the screenshots of the Twitter admin tools, later on, his account was blocked and the content was removed — Krebs’ detailed research and analysis shows.
Elon Musk is using his Twitter account normally after this cybersecurity incident, he already has been very keen on his online privacy and security and is known to crush his phone every year and moves to a new one but it seems this time it wasn’t enough.
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- Watch Elon Musk’s AMA with Hack Club students
- Listen to Elon Musk in Tesla’s Q1 2020 Earnings Call
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One reply on “By taking over Elon Musk and other high-profile Twitter accounts the hacker made $180k+”
Wow! This is awesome! It clearly made no difference to these, curiously all anti-45 1%s, but the question remains:
You had a chance to hack 45s Twitter account and you didn’t close it?