People within the SIM swapping community are obsessed with hijacking so-called вЂњOGвЂќ social media accounts. There are strong indications that this attack was perpetrated by individuals whoвЂ™ve traditionally specialized in hijacking social media accounts via вЂњ SIM swapping,вЂќ an increasingly rampant form of crime that involves bribing, hacking or coercing employees at mobile phone and social media companies into providing access to a targetвЂ™s account. WeвЂ™re looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed and will share more here as we have it.вЂќ We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf.

Twitter issued a statement saying it detected вЂњa coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools. While it may sound ridiculous that anyone would be fooled into sending bitcoin in response to these tweets, an analysis of the BTC wallet promoted by many of the hacked Twitter profiles shows that over the past 24 hours the account has processed 383 transactions and received almost 13 bitcoin - or approximately USD $117,000.

Minutes after that, similar tweets went out from the accounts of other cryptocurrency exchanges, and from the Twitter accounts for democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, President Barack Obama, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and investment mogul Warren Buffett. The first public signs of the intrusion came around 3 PM EDT, when the Twitter account for the cryptocurrency exchange Binance tweeted a message saying it had partnered with вЂњCryptoForHealthвЂќ to give back 5000 bitcoin to the community, with a link where people could donate or send money.

This post is an attempt to lay out some of the timeline of the attack, and point to clues about who may have been behind it. Twitter says the attack happened because someone tricked or coerced an employee into providing access to internal Twitter administrative tools. Twitter was thrown into chaos on Wednesday after accounts for some of the worldвЂ™s most recognizable public figures, executives and celebrities starting tweeting out links to bitcoin scams.

Twitter account hacker