$ 121,000 in the spoils of the attack on Twitter

The attack carried out in recent days on Twitter has brought in the pockets of its authors a figure that is around 121,000 dollars, convincing some naive victims to send Bitcoin in the hope of being able to receive double the response through posts published on about 130 known accounts compromised for the occasion. The sum would have been much higher if exchanges such as Coinbase had not intervened by promptly stopping the transfer of cryptocurrencies to cybercriminals' addresses.

Twitter attack: Coinbase avoided worse trouble

Made it I note the platform, declaring that it has prevented more than 1,100 of its users from completing the payment, saving a total of 30.4 Bitcoins, equal to about $ 280,000 according to the current exchange rate. Only 14 people sent out a counter value of around $ 3,000 before the wallet was blacklisted. This is the brief statement given to Forbes by Philip Martin, Coinbase's Chief Information Security Officer.

We noticed in less than a minute the tweets of Gemini and Binance. There was a relatively small group of Coinbase users who tried to send Bitcoin to the scam's address.

The author of the action could be Joseph James Connor, known online as PlugWalkJoe, a young member of the group ChucklingSquad already able to puncture Jack Dorsey's number one account last year.



The attack took aim at the profiles of the first floor, like those of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Kanye West and Mike Bloomberg, but also companies like Apple, Uber, Gemini, and the same Coinbase, publishing in the name of post in which you were asked to send sums in Bitcoin in order to receive in exchange twice.

Source: Forbes