Celebrities Hacked On Twitter With Bitcoin Accounts

Recently there has been a big hack on Twitter where multiple hackers gained access to many celebrities accounts and posted fake Tweets stating that if people sent their bitcoin accounts to the famous figure that the celebrity would send you back double the number of bitcoins in their account.

The bitcoin accounts associated with the scam received more than 400 transfers totalling more than $100,000. 

Twitter says that the hack affected 130 people and most of those accounts were Twitter's most high profile users. The hackers were able to reset 45 of those accounts.

Mason Sheppard, a 19-year-old from Bognor Regis, U.K., under the name “Chaewon” was charged in California with a conspiracy of committing money laundering, wire fraud and unauthorized access to a computer.

Nima Fazeli, a 22-year-old from Orlando, U.S, under the name “Rolex” was also charged in Northern California with abetting access internationally.

The U.S Justice department will not name the last defendant in the case as the juvenile wants to protect the identity of the youth. NBC News recently reported that the authorities have arrested Graham Clark a 17-year-old who might be the centre of this Twitter hack. 17-year-old Graham Clark.

Graham Clark

There is still an unidentified hacker who goes under the name “Kirk” who might have also had a central role as many suspects this hacker was behind the attack. No one knows exactly how “Kirk” got access to Twitter’s internal tools, but some think that a Twitter employee’s account was hijacked. With a hijacked employee account, “Kirk” made their way into the internal network. Many believe that it is unlikely that this was an inside job by a Twitter employee but recently a reporter said he spoke anonymously with a few of the hackers from the hack on Twitter and they claimed to have paid a Twitter employee to gain access to a tool that provides deep control over high-profile Twitter accounts. 

What will twitter do to control how much its employees have access to people's accounts and what is being done to prevent this from happening again?

Many celebrities were hacked including former president Barack Obama, Microsoft's Bill Gates, CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos, Tesla's Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.

Twitter said in a blog post “We’re embarrassed, we’re disappointed and more than anything, we’re sorry. We know that we must work to regain your trust, and we will support all efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice,”

President Trump's account was not hacked even though it is arguably the most high profile account on Twitter and this is probably due to more security from twitter implemented in his account as in 2017 one of Trump's employees famously deleted Trump's account and it was all over the news so it makes sense that they made the account more secure. The thing that many are wondering now is what this social media platform is going to do about the security of other users' accounts to prevent this from happening again.

This scheme was financially motivated but what would happen if it was not financially motivated. These people got access to everything and could have posted anything. They could have posted something rude or offensive or could have posted false news or about anything they wanted, and as the accounts, they chose to hack have a pretty big audience whatever these hackers posted would have been seen by possibly millions of people. This just comes to show that with enough time and effort your account is never 100% secure.

Alexandra Vidoret-Ponce

Social Media Enthusiast, an actress, listens to 90s dance music, a fan of comedy shows, travelling abroad and ice cream.