On Wednesday, 15th July 2020 around 4:00 PM dozens of prominent personalities’ twitter account in America was hacked including – Joseph R. Biden Jr., ex-president Barak Obama ,Kanye West, Bill Gates and Elon Musk
Not only this but also the same message was posted on twitter “send bitcoin and famous people will send back double your money.” Initially, the hacker attacked the prominent cryptocurrency leaders and many companies but as soon as list came up the hackers main target were people from Hollywood industries, politics and other famous personalities.
For prevention, twitter has deleted the bitcoin message from many accounts but after deleting the message is still been posted again and again through this practice hacker and is symbolizing Twitter as powerless and in no control of their app. For a few hours, Twitter has shut down some of their services due to which verified users will not be able to tweet.
Twitter posted a tweet saying “you will unable to tweet or reset the password while we review and address the incident.” They also informed the users that at 8:30 PM they will able to use all the services of Twitter.
Twitter’s spokesman also acknowledged “We’re looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they have accessed.” Moreover, he also added “we’ve taken significant steps to limit access to internal system and tools while we are investigation is ongoing”
The chief executive of Twitter – Joe Biden on Wednesday night posted on twitter “tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened. We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happen.”
One of the culprit behind this hacking is speculated to be North Korea as they have been shown to possess documents of using Bitcoin in their past history, but according to some this might be acchildish reason for doing so. Also, according to American Intelligence Agency this work is likely to be of an individual hacker rather than a state. The hacker did not attack on the account of most powerful user ‘President Donald Trump’ and after this incident his account is under special security.
Mr. Stamos said “It could have been much worse. We got lucky that this is what they decide to do with the power”
According to Mr Stamos, the hacker/hackers have committed some mistake as they sent the same message from every account which makes it easy for them to detect and delete. Also, as they ask money through bitcoin this shows that they are unwilling to use the accounts of prominent personality for the big scam.
Well, at last, it is very disappointing as Twitter is one of the most used social media platforms and still they do not have proper security which may cause a problem in the future.
By: Anjali Sharma