Today could be one of the worst days in Twitter¡¯s history. A mass hacking of verified accounts of influential people occurred on its microblogging platform that resulted in tweets going viral for promoting a bitcoin scam worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.?
While Twitter has gone ahead and revealed that an internal tool was used to conduct these hackings, not much was otherwise revealed by the social media giant.?
However, some tech publications got access to people who are aware of the situation and have made some striking revelations.?
A hacker who is a part of the underground hacking scene connected with TechCrunch and revealed that the person responsible for this goes by the name of ¡®Kirk¡¯ and has managed to scam people using the aforementioned Twitter tool.
The tool allegedly allowed him to reset the associated email addresses of affected accounts to gain full control and making it almost impossible for the actual owner to recover the account. The tool also allowed twitter employees to execute other actions like suspending accounts, blacklisting or highlighting trends among other things.?
Apparently, Kirk initially used to sell vanity Twitter accounts -- cool sounding and easy to remember usernames by hacking users and selling the accounts for a few hundred dollars, even thousands at times.
In chats shared by the anonymous user with TechCrunch, Kirk had connected with a trusted user on OGUsers -- a forum for hacked social media accounts -- and asked him to share the usernames and BTC to hijack accounts. However, in some time, Kirk eventually started highjacking each and every account.
The first account that this so-called hacker tried to takedown was bitcoin exchange company Binance, followed by several other cryptocurrency accounts. This was then followed by accounts of some major people in tech including Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, even former US President Barrack Obama and presidential candidate Joe Biden among several others.?
The tipper didn¡¯t clearly reveal how ¡®Kirk¡¯ got access to the tool, but he theorized that a Twitter employee¡¯s account was probably hacked which gave Kirk access to the secret tools. He did highlight the fact that it is unlikely that a twitter employee was involved in this attack.
Another anonymous tipper, in a conversation with Motherboard, has revealed that a Twitter insider was indeed responsible for this hacking. The tipper allegedly claims that they paid a Twitter insider to do everything for them.?
Since nothing is confirmed as of now, we would advise you to take this information with a grain of salt. However, it surely makes one think -- when will we be truly safe on the internet?