By Raphael Meyer
On Wednesday, July 15th, an unprecedented attack unfolded on Twitter, where hackers were able to take control of many accounts belonging to celebrities, from Elon Musk to Bill Gates to presidential candidate Joe Biden. It is unclear how the hackers managed to get control of such a large portion of Twitter, but it puts in focus the security issues of a company that hosts such an important part of the public conversation.
The hackers used this opportunity for financial gain by impersonating celebrities and asking their followers – in fake tweets – to send them amounts in bitcoins that they promised to send back doubled. This is the latest iteration of a classic scam that has been very popular on Youtube recently. The scam plays of the credulity (and greed) of users of social media, but to their defense, the tweets had all the appearance of legitimacy.
The security issue should be a prime concern for Twitter, who had to suspend part of its service for hours, but it also a negative advertisement for Bitcoin, even though the cryptocurrency remains very secure and has no direct link with the attack. The only good news is that funds can be traced openly in Bitcoin, which will make it harder for the hackers to spend their money.
Raphael Meyer lives in Greenwich. He grew up in France and has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from ENS Cachan. He’s the manager of ADR Collection, an art investment company, and writes cryptocurrency articles on Medium (https://medium.com/@meyer.raph).
