Twitter Bitcoin Hack Could Have Been Much Worse

Twitter said on Wednesday, July 15, that the high-profile accounts on the social media platform were compromised as a part of a "coordinated social engineering attack” during which the hackers used the company’s internal tools and systems.

The social media company said in a statement that the hackers targeted some of its employees to use internal tools and systems to compromise the few most popular profiles on its platform.

Even though the company said that a "coordinated social engineering attack had successfully targeted some of our employees,” a contra indicatory report published before suggested that the attack had been enabled by one of its employees. The claim was based on an interview with a hacker, however, the news is not confirmed or verified yet.

Twitter, in the meantime, is conducting investigations related to the hack and is expected to come up with further details soon.

The attack began on Wednesday with a bitcoin-related message posted from several high-profile accounts from Elon Musk to Kim Kardashian and Joe Biden. In the message, the users were asked to send money to a posted Bitcoin account with a promise that they will receive twice as much back.

The hackers later claimed that they made about $118,000 from it.

More than who did it, the hacking attempt has led to further questioning related to safety and security. The attempt shows that Twitter employees have fairly good control over user accounts.

Additionally, the hacking episode confirms that Twitter employees can not only suspend an account of the user but also reset the email address linked to the account.

Twitter said on Wednesday that it has decided to “limit” the access to internal tools and systems by its employees as the investigation is underway.

Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, said that the hack could have been much worse.

"It could have been much worse," Stamos said. "We got lucky that this is what they decided to do with their power."