Twitter accounts of Target, one of the leading retailers in the United States, and Google G Suite services temporarily fell into the hands of intruders, who immediately announced the bitcoin giveaway. The style of both messages allows us to suggest that the same group of hackers is responsible for what happened.
The legitimate owners returned access to their pages quickly, but fraudsters nevertheless managed to illegally receive about $30,000.
Attackers hacked the G Suite account, which has more than 800 thousand subscribers, and on behalf of the IT corporation wrote that they decided to hold “the biggest crypto giveaway in the world.” Hackers announced the distribution of 10,000 BTC. However, this post was deleted after 10 minutes.
Google representatives have already confirmed the fact of hacking. “This was an unauthorized promoted tweet account. “We removed the tweet and are investigating with Twitter now,” the company reported.
Target account, which has a little less than 2 million subscribers, announced the distribution of 5,000 BTC. Representatives of the company also confirmed hacking the account, starting an investigation into the circumstances of the incident. At the same time, the malicious message in the G Suite account lasted only a for few minutes, but the attackers managed to maintain access to the Target account for half an hour.
Early this morning, our Twitter account was inappropriately accessed. The access lasted for approx. half an hour & one fake tweet was posted during that time about a bitcoin scam. We have regained control of the account, are in close contact with Twitter & are investigating now.
— Target (@Target) November 13, 2018
Representatives of Twitter commented on the situation, noting that their team revealed several similar incidents lately, and promising to take measures to prevent fraudulent activities in the future.Indeed, cryptocurrency fraud on Twitter is not uncommon.
Already this month, hackers attacked several confirmed Twitter accounts to impersonate Tesla's head EIona Musk. After hacking, the fraudsters changed their names and profile pictures and announced that a well-known entrepreneur had organized a distribution of 10,000 “Bitcoic”.
Due to the increased incidence of fraud, the social media have begun a massive sweep. Twitter started deleting supposedly fake accounts created for airdrop and bounty campaigns. Most of these accounts were subscribers of cryptocurrency projects.
At the same time, the head of Twitter and payment startup Square Jack Dorsey said in September that his company was exploring the possibility of using blockchain technology to fight fraudsters. He noted that the distributed ledger technology is excellent for establishing trusted relationships in the digital world. This is especially important in the light of the fake accounts that have flooded social media and are trying to fool users and lure their cryptocurrency.
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