High-profile Twitter accounts hijacked in crypto scam

By Admire Moyo for ITWeb
Thursday, July 16, 2020

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Social media platform Twitter has been hit by a massive social engineering attack targeting top users such as US presidential candidate Joe Biden, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, former US president Barack Obama, and reality TV star Kim Kardashian.

Commenting on the attack, Ilia Kolochenko, founder and CEO of Web security company ImmuniWeb, says this incident is truly unusual due to the audacity and creativity of the attackers.

“The scale of the reported attack and the diversity of the victims unambiguously point out that Twitter, or one of its key suppliers, has likely been breached by the attackers,” Kolochenko says.

“We may seek other commonalities among the mushrooming victims, like a shared social media management company that may have been breached, but the chances are considerably lower of this being the cause of the attack,” he notes.

In both cases, Kolochenko adds, “if the attackers got access and managed to steal Twitter’s databases, and are not just opportunistically exploiting an unknown authentication bypass flaw in one of its systems, millions of users and enterprises are at critical risk of highly sophisticated phishing, ransomware, identity theft and many other attacks for the next few years.

“This attack is unprecedentedly smart and coordinated. This incident highlights the extreme fragility of the modern information space. In a similar disinformation campaign, nation-state actors may simply announce a military or nuclear incident and provoke national havoc, or spread fake news about a rival business to ruin its stock price and then purchase it for pennies.

“We expect Twitter to gradually share information about the investigation, and a detailed forensic report about the root causes of the incident.” Read Full Article