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In a show of force majeure, the hackers violated the site’s maximum critical accounts, a Who is Who of Americans in the fields of politics, entertainment and technology.
By She Frenkel, Nathaniel Popper, Kate Conger and David E. Sanger
It’s around 4pm on Wednesday after noon on the East Coast when chaos hits online. Dozens of America’s biggest names, adding Joseph R. Biden Jr., Barack Obama, Kanye West, Bill Gates and Elon Musk, have posted similar messages on Twitter: Send Bitcoin and noted that other Americans would send you their money twice.
All of this was a scam, of course, the result of bragged online memory attacks.
A first wave of attacks hit the Twitter accounts of prominent leaders and cryptocurrency companies. But soon after, the patient list expanded to arrive with a Who’s Who of Americans in politics, entertainment and technology, in a major demonstration of the strength of hackers.
Twitter temporarily deleted Apple Mabig’s messages, however, at some points similar tweets were sent from similar accounts, suggesting that Twitter cannot regain control.
Apple’s best friend eventugreatest disabled giant sections of its service, adding the strength of verified users to tweet, for more than an hour as it worked to prevent the scam from spreading further. The compabig apple sent a tweet saying it was investigating the difficulty and a solution. “You may not be able to tweet or reset your password while we review and focus on this incident,” the apple said in a moment. Service was restored at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday night.
Twitter’s research into success revealed that several staff members who had access to internal systems had their accounts compromised with a “coordinated social engineering attack,” one spokesman said, referring to attacks that cause other Americans to ignore their credentials. The attackers then used Twitter’s internal systems to tweet from important accounts like Biden’s.
“We are other malicious activities they could have done or the facts they have been able to access,” the Twitter spokesman added. “We have taken a critical breeding station to limit access to internal systems and machinery while our research is ongoing.”
Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s executive leader, said in a message Wednesday night that it was a “difficult day for us” on Twitter. We’re all sorry that this has happened. We will diagnose and allocate a percentage of everything we may be capable of when we have a more complete underpretid of exactly what happened. “
The hackers did not use their access to establish critical establishments or infralayout, but only asked for Bitcoin. But the attack concerned security experts, as he reported that hackers may also have smoothly caused a larger load.
There is little immediate evidence as to who led the attack. It has been documented that one of the main obvious culprits of an attack of this magnitude, North Korea, has widely used Bitcoin in the past. But its “effective, but also amateur” nature in the words of a senior U.S. intelligence official led U.S. intelligence agencies to an initial assessment that it is probably the paintings of an individual hacker, not a state.
If it had been Russia, China, North Korea or Iran, the official said, who does not speak because an intelligence investigation was not legal, the effort would probably have concentrated on hunting to wreak havoc on the stock market or issue perhaplaystation. policy statements about becoming a component of Biden or other objectives.
Authorities also noted that success was not the account of one of Twitter’s most watched and challenging users: President Trump. Trump’s account is under a special kind of lock and key after beyond the incidents, the official noted.
Security experts said large-scale attacks reported that the difficulty was caused through a successful defense on the Twitter service, not through lax security measures used through the targets. Alex Stamos, director of Stanford’s Internet Observatory and beyond Facebook’s head of security, said there was a chain of other theories, but they all advised that the attackers break into the Twitter system, rather than stealing passwords from individual users.
A U.S. official called it a “terrifying possibility” in a world where national leaders, mimicking Trump’s techniques, have followed Twitter as the main source of unfiltered communications.
“It may also have been much worse. We were fortunate that this is what they did with their power,” Stamos said.
The hacker or the hackers made rookie mistakes. Stamos said that because the attackers had sent the same messages from compromised accounts, it was undeniable that they would stumble and eliminate. He added that the direct decision to invite coins via Bitcoin showed that the attackers had a maximum, probably unwilling to launder coins or use their access for a more confusing scam.
The messages were an edition of a long-running scam in which hackers pose as public figures on Twitter and promise to adjust or, perhaps, triple the budget sent to their Bitcoin wallets. But Wednesday’s attacks were the first time that authentic accounts of public figures were used in scams.
Bitcoin is a favorite vehicle for this type of scam because once a victim sends money, designing Bitcoin, without a set-up, it makes it virtually the unimaginable best friend to rechannel the funds.
By Wednesday night, the Bitcoin wals broker we promoted in the tweets had won more than three hundred transmovements and Bitcoin charged more than $100,000, according to websites that adhere to Bitcoin’s public login of transmovements, known as blockchain.
A scam on Twitter was propelled into the mainstream after the hackers took several important accounts and ordered their fans to send them Bitcoin with the promise that they would double the amount.
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