A tweet from Bill Gates’ account said, “You send $1000, I send you back $2000”, along with several other major US twitter accounts which were hacked earlier this week, were part of a major “coordinated” attack with access to crucial internal systems and tools. Targets including former US president Barack Obama, for US Vice President Joe Biden, US rapper Kanye West, television personality, Kim Kardashian West, CEO of SpaceX Elon Musk were flabbergasted after receiving messages from various people to give them back $2000 claiming that they had sent $1000 by using a bitcoin link sent to them by these people.
The attack was a mastermind operation, highly coordinated to hack verified (accounts with a blue tick) accounts and send out messages with a bitcoin address disguised to loot people whoever sent money to it.
Elon Musk” tweet said, “I’m feeling generous because of Covid-19” after which followed the bitcoin link.
After receiving news of what happened, twitter locked the profiles from which the tweets had gone and immediately deleted those tweets.
Beyond which, an Instagram account named “CryptoForHealth” was created with “it was us” followed by a mild smile in the description, apparently claiming responsibility for the attack which had just happened.
What we need to learn from this?
Observing the grueling situations, the pandemic has put us in, increasingly sophisticated forms of financial frauds like the one mentioned above have been happening, putting our citizens in high risk of financial loss and deteriorating the safety in the digital environment.
As Dmitri Alperovitch, cofounder of CrowdStrike, a cyber security company said “this appears to be a worst hack of a major social media platform yet.”, there is worse to come and we need to be aware of how to identify such delinquent scams and protect ourselves and the digital environment.
This “smash and grab” operation was just one of the various multifaceted and versatile forms of scams which are happening these days, it could be a simple OTP or an Email claiming to be a rummy prize or a major attack across the world like the “double bitcoin scam”.
Our responsibility of protecting ourselves and our loved ones starts with authenticating the source of the message we have received and reporting of the same to valid reporting platforms upon confirmation of potential fraudulent capacity.
TrustCheckr has introduced a product “Check For Trust”, a dynamic platform to authenticate unknown phone numbers asking for OTPs (One Time Passwords, usually given out by banking companies to the customers for confirming and processing online payments) and to report fraudulent ones.