Coinbase stopped scammers from stealing an extra $280,000 during Twitter hack
Maybe Coinbase should send Twitter an invoice, because it certainly sounds like their quick thinking helped prevent last week’s hack from leaving a lot more Twitter users with empty wallets.
As we reported at the time, cybercriminals successfully managed to seize control of a number of high profile Twitter accounts last week, using them to tweet out messages designed to trick unsuspecting followers into handing over their Bitcoins.
The messages, which were posted from the genuine Twitter accounts of the likes of Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Kanye West, Apple, Uber, and others invited users to send their money to a Bitcoin wallet under criminal control, with the promise that they would double their money.
Twitter subsequently confirmed that a social engineering attack had “successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools,” and this is what had allowed hackers to hijack the accounts for the scam.
To its credit, Twitter has been fairly open about the incident, and shared that it believed 130 accounts had been targeted in the attack.
In all it is estimated that the hackers had approximately $100,000 transferred to them by users duped by the scam.
That’s obviously not good, but things could have been a lot worse.
According to an interview with Forbes, quick action by leading Bitcoin exchange Coinbase prevented much more money from being sent to the scammers.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from HOTforSecurity authored by Graham Cluley. Read the original post at: https://hotforsecurity.bitdefender.com/blog/coinbase-stopped-scammers-from-stealing-an-extra-280000-during-twitter-hack-23783.html
