Cyber

On 15 July 2020, Twitter accounts belonging to Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and other public figures were subject to coordinated “social engineering” attacks. According to Twitter, the attackers “successfully targeted some of [the company’s] employees with access to internal systems and tools”. The compromised accounts swiftly set in motion a large-scale cryptocurrency fraud scheme, inviting Twitter users to send Bitcoins to an unverified wallet, with the promise of a 2:1 return on every transaction. The tweets were prefaced by the message “I am giving back to the community”, in an apparent attempt to capitalize on the current political momentum in the US. This was the second large-scale cryptocurrency scam executed on Twitter this year. In January, verified Twitter accounts were taken over by scammers and transformed into identical copies of Elon Musk’s official account, inviting Twitter users to a “crypto party”. While the above incidents may be attributed to security flaws, internal protocol breaches or carelessness in the administration and storage of credentials by…