“Blue Check Twitter” Silenced Following Massive Bitcoin Scam, Jokes Ensued

Even during a global pandemic, these hackers are still bored out of their minds and can’t find a better use of their “skills.”

Wednesday (Jul.16) the Twitter accounts of many high-profile users of the social media platform, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Apple, , his wife Kim Kardashian, Tesla chief , Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos and more were used in a crypto-currency scheme.

The cause of the breach was not immediately clear, the scope and rather unusual large scale of the attack were quickly realized due to how many accounts were breached. Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch who has seen his fair share of breaches in his day, described this latest cyber intrusion as “the worst hack of a major social media platform yet.”

Reportedly the scammers received more than $100,000 worth of cryptocurrency. Alperovitch “says things could have been far worse and that the public dodged a massive bullet.”

“We are lucky that given the power of sending out tweets from the accounts of many famous people, the only thing that the hackers have done is scammed about $110,000 in bitcoins from about 300 people.”

Sheesh.

In a series of Tweets, Twitter announced it was investigating the “security incident” and also stated:

“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.”

Twitter also announced that it would at the time in response to the targeted attack on verified accounts, aka “blue check Twitter” would limit their activity, which including not allowing them to tweet.

BUT, Twitter did not mention a story on Motherboard that shared photos of the internal tools and “citing anonymous sources in the SIM swapping community that said an insider did the work for them.”

As with any situation on social media, regular Twitter seized the moment to make light of the brief moment that “blue check Twitter” was silenced while they pretty much ran timelines.

All we ask is, can these hackers do something productive like finding tax returns? Or how about throwing a cyber monkeywrench into Sallie Mae’s bill collecting plans?

Anyway, you can peep the reactions to the bitcoin scam that rocked the verified Twitter massive in the gallery below.

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Photo: Chanin Wardkhian / Getty