By Solomon Odunayo
The CTO at Ripple, David Schwartz has recently hinted at what possibly made the Twitter accounts of companies and important personalities easily breached by Bitcoin scammers. The victims of the coordinated perpetration include Ripple, Elon Musk, Binance, CZ, Bill Gates, Justin Sun, Coinbase, CoinDesk, among others.
Twitter Accounts Got Breached By Hackers
It became a pandemonium across all social media after the Twitter accounts of the world’s most notable personalities and businesses got compromised by desperate and coordinated hackers.
After the successful breach, the scammers started using the dominated accounts to lure unsuspecting BTC holders into a fake giveaway of Bitcoin.
Some messages on the compromised Twitter accounts stated that the owner of the accounts had partnered with “CryptoForHealth” and were giving away 5,000 BTC to the community.
This strategy, whereby, scammers lure users to send them crypto, promising to send back double of the amount, is usual with the crypto ecosystem. But this recent perpetration is simply overblown. The point of taking their callousness beyond the crypto space to the conventional business world has exposed Bitcoin to negative representations.
Many major news outlets are now chanting “Bitcoin Scam”, which is basically the wrong representation of the whole scenario. Scammers only took advantage of the breached accounts to siphon BTC.
Main stream media coverage of this hack & privacy breach: "bitcoin scam", "bitcoin scam", "bitcoin scam" … pic.twitter.com/ywlXoaxxo0
— PlanB (@100trillionUSD) July 16, 2020
David Schwartz Hints At the Possible Cause of the Hack
The Ripple CTO, David Schwartz was one of the crypto big guns that used their capacity to inform the crypto community members about the breached Twitter account and the enterprise of the scammers.
In the middle of the perpetration, David Schwartz wrote:
‘CAUTION: There is a massive effort underway to steal cryptocurrencies. DO NOT SEND cryptocurrencies to anyone who sends they will send you more back. It does not matter who the Tweet comes from. IT IS A SCAM.”
CAUTION: There is a massive effort underway to steal cryptocurrencies. DO NOT SEND cryptocurrencies to anyone who sends they will send you more back. It does not matter who the Tweet comes from. IT IS A SCAM.
— Ｄａｖｉｄ "ＪｏｅｌＫａｔｚ" Ｓｃｈｗａｒｔｚ (@JoelKatz) July 15, 2020
As dust started settling down gradually, many suggestions about the means they used to beat Twitter’s security before the takeovers started flying around.
According to the Ripple CTO, all the accounts that were hacked used third party monitoring services, which opened their accounts easily for intruders to penetrate.
Schwartz tweeted, “The latest I’m hearing is that all of the compromised accounts used third party scheduling/monitoring services that had read/write app access to their accounts.”
The latest I'm hearing is that all of the compromised accounts used third party scheduling/monitoring services that had read/write app access to their accounts.
— Ｄａｖｉｄ "ＪｏｅｌＫａｔｚ" Ｓｃｈｗａｒｔｚ (@JoelKatz) July 15, 2020
The investigation about the unauthorized takeover is still ongoing. The Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has promised to unravel the cause of the breach and get back to the community.