Recently, Twitter faced a massive hack that breached multiple verified prominent accounts and sent the site to a temporary freeze.
The fraud set off when Binance, a crypto exchange firm posted in a Tweet that anyone who forwarded bitcoin to a given address, would earn more in return.
Minutes later, hackers posted parallel messages from Tweeter handles of famous personalities like Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Elon Musk (Tesla Boss), Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO), and Kim Kardashian users to send bitcoin to a provided address and win more bitcoin.
The deceitful posts lasted more than an hour, and at some point, Twitter inactivated the Tweeting feature in all verified accounts for half-an-hour.
As Twitter struggled to regain control of the situation, the bitcoin address provided in the posts managed to gather up to 13 bitcoin (approximately $117,000).
Many see it as one of the biggest breaches in Twitter’s lifetime, and conspiracy theories have cited this was a wake-up call for a more massive scam that went down simultaneously.
Many also assume sophisticated players organized it, but new clues from expert Brian Krebs and cybersafety company Unit 211B have reason to believe youngster hackers masterminded the scam.
According to the team, the alleged perpetrators boasted their ability to hack Twitter accounts in online hacker discussions days before the attack.
One user boasted in a criminal forum dabbed OGusers that he could breach Twitter accounts, agreeing to sell them for anything from $250 to $3,000.
Earlier, some two Twitter handles (@shinji and @b) had posted images of Twitter’s internal tools. According to Motherboard, those tools can do an email change and breach an account without the owner’s knowledge.
With the help of an informant who offers security services in a US-based mobile service, Krebs tailed the two accounts to an infamous hacker known as PlugWalkJoe.
According to Krebs, this name is famous for SIM swapping fraud and has ties to ChucklingSquad, a SIM-swappers’ Syndicated believed to have breached Twitter CEO last year.
PlugWalkJoe, according to Krebs’ intelligence, is Joseph James Connor, 21 from Liverpool, UK, who’s hiding somewhere in Spain.
The investigations did not determine, however, whether PlugWalkJoe executed the breach alone or had other accomplices.
However, further examinations into the hack show hackers may have had access to the personal info in breached accounts, which supposedly led to other blackmail scams.
Author Bio:
Payment industry guru Taylor Cole is a passionate payments expert who understands the complex world of best merchant accounts. He also writes non-fiction, on subjects ranging from personal finance to stocks to cryptopay. He enjoys eating pie on his backyard porch, as should all right-thinking people.
