The bitcoin donation scam racked up more than 100 grand before the internet caught on.
From “Twitter hack targets Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Apple and hundreds more” ($) posted Wednesday:
Twitter experienced an unprecedented hack on Wednesday when bitcoin scammers sent a series of tweets from the official accounts of Apple, Uber, Joe Biden, Elon Musk and hundreds of others, reaping more than $100,000 and raising security questions for the social media platform.
The platform said that some of its employees had been targeted by a social engineering campaign, allowing hackers to gain access to its internal systems. It was still investigating the severity of the incident, it said.
Appearing across multiple high-profile accounts in a matter of minutes, various tweets promised users that the account holders would double donations from anyone who sent funds to a bitcoin address…
Apple, whose verified Twitter account @Apple has never sent a message since it was set up in September 2011, tweeted: “We are giving back to our community. We support Bitcoin and we believe you should too!”
My take: @Apple, of course, had no comment.
As the political elections near, this hack serves only as a reminder how rogue nations can undermine our democracy. I also see how the hack easily can undermine our financial investment system. For example, Elon Musk has a history of sending out weird tweets, and yesterday’s tweet from his account easily could have said something relative to Tesla’s production schedule for rogue investors to short the stock. Then I think of how this hack just feeds more fodder to Congressional representatives seeking to over regulate technology companies.
This hack will cost Twitter in more ways than one.