Twitter Hacked by Social Engineering
On July 15, 2020, several very high profile twitter accounts were hacked and posted tweets offering to double the amount of bitcoin that was sent to a wallet link in the tweet. Anyone who was fooled into sending $1000 in bitcoin to one of those links is now $1000 lighter and will not see the $2000 in bitcoin returned to them that they had hoped for.
How did this happen? High profile users like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos almost certainly have strong passwords and 2-factor authentication in place on their devices where their twitter accounts are accessed so how did the hackers get access?
As it turns out, there appears to have been a very complex social engineering ploy aimed at twitter employees that successfully gave the hackers access to the victim accounts. Social engineering is any human to human contact or communication for the purpose of influencing a target to provide access or information that they should probably keep to themselves. It’s a major problem in the real estate industry and something we train our employees on constantly. We have monthly information security training and weekly email phishing tests to keep our people on their toes and on the lookout for malicious social engineering attempts.
Here’s an article about the recent attack on twitter’s employees: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/15/hackers-appear-to-target-twitter-accounts-of-elon-musk-bill-gates-others-in-digital-currency-scam.html
Peter Casey Wall
Director of Technology and Compliance