Twitter Claims Hackers Targeted Around 130 Accounts
- From the 130 accounts the hackers were targeting, only a “small subset” sent tweets asking for Bitcoin.
- Data from Chainalysis shows that around $126,000 have been transferred to the hacker’s addresses so far.
Illustration from Freepik
Twitter has confirmed that the hackers behind the “Crypto for Health” attack from earlier this week had targeted more than 130 accounts, the firm said in a thread on 17 July.
According to the social media giant, the unidentified attackers targeted around 130 accounts in some way, but were able to send tweets asking for bitcoin only with a “small subset” of those accounts. The firm has also assured its users that “aggressive steps” have been taken to secure its systems, such as disabling the download Your Twitter Data for all accounts, and that it is continuing to work closely with impacted users.
The firm said:
“We’re working with impacted account owners and will continue to do so over the next several days. We are continuing to assess whether non-public data related to these accounts was compromised, and will provide updates if we determine that occurred.”
The Wednesday hack saw the accounts of prominent celebrities being hijacked, and used to promote a large-scale bitcoin scam. Among the affected were personalities such as the former President Barack Obama, former Vice President Joe Biden, Kanye West, Elon Musk, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, as well as companies such as Coinbase, KuCoin, and Gemini.
According to cryptocurrency tracing firm Chainalysis, which is monitoring the wallets associated with the hack, the main Bitcoin address of the attackers has received around $120,000 in BTC from 375 transactions. From the other three known addresses, two received $6,700 in around 100 transactions, while the only XRP address has received zero funds. The firm also pointed out that the largest victim of the scam, who donated around $40,000, could possibly be from Japan.
- Karl Greenwood, co-founder of the OneCoin crypto pyramid scheme, was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and ordered to pay back the $300 million he made in commissions.
- Greenwood was the “global master distributor and the leader of the MLM (multi-level marketing) network” during his time in OneCoin, earning him 5% of all monthly sales.
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- Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has regained his T-Mobile account, which on Saturday was compromised by hackers and used to take over his X account.
- On 9 September, hackers used a SIM-swap attack to take over Buterin’s X account, and siphon close to $700,000 in crypto by promoting a fake NFT giveaway.
- Faruk Özer and his two siblings were sentenced to 11,196 years in prison for their involvement in the $2 billion rug pull of Turkish crypto exchange Thodex in 2021.
- Özer fled the country after the collapse of the exchange, but was detained in Albania a year later, and extradited back to Türkiye in April 2023 where he faced seven criminal charges.