Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Barack Obama: these personalities and many others were targeted Wednesday by a massive hacking of cryptocurrencies on Twitter, which brings back to the fore the issue of cybersecurity. Messages on these hacked accounts, most of them quickly erased, in particular invited internet users to quickly send bitcoins to specific addresses, claiming to send back in exchange double the amounts transferred.
According to the specialized site Blockchain.com, which tracks transactions carried out in cryptocurrencies, a total of 12.58 bitcoins, or nearly 116,000 dollars, was sent to one of the addresses mentioned in the fraudulent tweets. "Happy Wednesday! I offer bitcoins to all my subscribers. I double all payments sent to the bitcoin address below," read users on the account of Elon Musk, the fanciful boss of Tesla.
The accounts of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg and famous investor Warren Buffett were posted during a time of messages with similar content. Those of companies like Apple and Uber as well as companies specialized in bitcoin were also victims of this very large-scale piracy.
Joe Biden's campaign indicated that the social network had blocked the Democratic candidate's account as soon as the intrusion was noticed in order to erase the problematic tweet.
Unable to tweet
"You may not be able to tweet or reset your password while we are investigating this incident," said a Twitter executive later when many users were unable to post. The company's stock fell more than 3% on Wall Street in electronic trading after the close.
"The most likely hypothesis is that hackers came into the Twitter employee administration panel, which allows passwords to be changed and deactivate authentication on several factors," said Rachel Tobac, president of the SocialProof Security cybersecurity company. Such manipulation, specifies Ms. Tobac, could have allowed individuals or malicious groups to take control of the attacked accounts.
The bluebird network has already been the target of targeted attacks in the past. But Wednesday's hacking, however, seems to be on a whole different scale and was already raising many questions just over 3 months before the US presidential election, where cybersecurity issues should be at the forefront.