No, Elon Musk will duplicate the Bitcoins you send him in an hour. Neither Uber, nor CashApp, Apple, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Joe Rogan, former Vice President Joe Biden, former presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg, Coinbase, nor any of the other cryptocurrency exchanges they recently tweeted providing a two-for-one special because of COVID-19.
But, you might think that if I had been on Twitter on Wednesday afternoon:
Musk’s account is just one of many high-level accounts and celebrities tweeting Bitcoin addresses with promises to return twice what shipped. The message also said that there was a limited time attached to the offer (“during the next hour”), giving the impression that it was being offered for a limited time and encouraging others to hurry before time runs out.
And it worked. At the time of writing, the other people who the attack collected more than 12.2 Bitcoins from more than 325 transactions, or more than $112,000 at the existing exchange rate.
Musk’s story was one of the first to be widely noticed, and rumors began to circulate about clues imaginable for the attack. Twitter users wondered: is it possible that only Musk’s account has been hacked? No, multiple accounts were compromised and two-factor authentication would have been enabled for multiple affected accounts. Confusion and theories abound on the social media platform around Wednesday afternoon. Perhaps the fault lies with a social media control company that has failed to protect its formula, some have wondered.
Then, rumors of several Blackhat Discord teams began to cite privileged reports that a panel of Twitter workers had been compromised, allowing unrestricted access to accounts. Similar tweets in particular discussed “CryptoForHealth”, an online page that temporarily stripped of its hosting through Cloudflare (the company that balances the site’s load) and its domain registrar, Namesilo.
Musk’s specific account has been a hot spot for social cryptocurrency engineering. It’s not unusual to read one of your Twitter feeds and watch a copycat post a Bitcoin or Ethereum address. At one point, Musk was even named honorary CEO of the Dogecoin cryptoparody.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s biography says “#bitcoin”
It’s appealing to note that the wrong actors have moved away from running into accounts like US President Donald Trump or Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, though former President Barack Obama and Biden have been targeted by scammers.
Since the violation has only a few hours, there is not much to know about those responsible, I am sure we will be more informed over time. And even though the existing six-digit output is relatively low, this is one of the most common cryptocurrency-related hacks of all time. Bigger than the mountain. Gox, Bitfinex and more visual than any other Bitcoin-related Ponzi scheme. It will probably even be considered as one of the best known Bitcoin social engineering scams to date.
And at the very least, it must have been a complicated afternoon at Twitter headquarters.
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