Wednesday the 15th of July at 1 p.m. a large number of celebrity brand accounts experienced a huge Twitter security breach. It was a bit of a strange one: the accounts of people like Kanye West, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Apple, Jeff bezos, Elon Musk, Uber, Floyd Mayweather, Barack Obama, Warren Buffett and Kim Kardashian.
The accounts all seemed to send a similar tweet along the lines of “we are giving back to our community we support bitcoin and we believe you should to, what you send will be sent back doubled” the messages gave a bitcoin wallet and mentioned there were only going to be doing this for the next 30 minutes.
Although very quickly coinbase said it blacklisted the hackers wallet address preventing more than 1000 customers sending around £220,000. Twitter are investigating the matter but, have released that the hackers talented employees who had access to internal systems and tools. Before Coinbase noticed the scam, 14 of its users and already $3,000 worth of Bitcoin.
It seems that Coinbase which is the largest UK Bitcoin exchange with around 35 million users around the world was very proactive with its policies limiting the effect of the hack but do be careful as not all cryptocurrencies or exchanges are are so on the ball and might be far more vulnerable to these scams in the future.