Twittergate: Binance, Coinbase, Apple, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos Accounts Hijacked by Crypto Scammers

A massive attack on the accounts of popular cryptocurrency exchanges and their representatives on Twitter occurred with thisin the evening.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao urged users not to follow the link on the exchange's Twitter account in his account. Soon, a fraudulent message was posted from his own account.

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The announcement says that the exchange has partnered with the CryptoForHealth project and will distribute 5,000 bitcoins to the community.

“The existing financial system has inflictedserious damage to the traditional economy, says the fraudulent website. “To support this challenging time, Huobi, KuCoin, Kraken, Gemini, Binance, Coinbase and Trezor partnered to give away 5,000 BTC.”

To participate, users are invited to sendto the specified address an amount from 0.1 BTC to 20 BTC, and "we will instantly send you back from 0.2 BTC to 40 BTC." This is a classic example of a cryptocurrency scam that has been known to the community for at least a few years. Users should not follow the links provided, much less send cryptocurrency to the specified addresses.

Also, Coinbase, Gemini,KuCoin, Gate.io, Bitfinex, OKEx, CoinDesk, Litecoin creator Charlie Lee, Tron Foundation and its CEO Justin Sun. At least some of them are known to use multi-factor authentication.

Shortly before mass publication, a fraudulentactivity was seen in the account of the famous trader AngeloBTC. He allegedly opens a paid group in Telegram, where he will post signals from "whales", but the price of information is 0.1 BTC. To gain access, users were asked to contact him through private messages. This post has been deleted by the time of publication.

Gate.io later announced that it "is not partnering with CryptoForHealth and donating 5,000 BTC to the community." Gemini co-founder Tyler Winklevoss also wrote that the message sent on behalf of his company is fraudulent.

Bitcoin enthusiast Andreas Antonopoulos speculates that an API service for posting messages to Twitter was hacked.

“A situation where all these accounts would not beprotected by strong passwords and two-factor authentication, excluded. I don't think Twitter was hacked. This is probably another social media posting intermediary used by many companies. They usually have lower security and limited options for two-factor authentication, but full access to the Twitter API that the user provides. Nobody is protected from hacking. I hope this fate will not befall me, but I will disable access through the API for now, ”he writes. - And more: Fuck "CryptoForHealth" ".

Later, the accounts of Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Ripple joined the fraudulent distribution. In the latter case, the proposal turned out to be different and contradictory:

“We are giving away 2,000 Ripples to random addresses that will send 1,000 Ripples to our COVID-19 fund. Each donor will receive 1,000 XRP! "

After 23:00 Moscow time CDN provider Cloudflare marked the CryptoForHealth website as phishing and started blocking access to it. At the same time, scammers began to post the address for deposits directly on Twitter, as in the case of Musk and Gates.

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A Binance spokesman said:

"The security team is actively investigating this coordinated attack on the crypto industry."

Twitter itself also reported that they were investigating what happened, but did not go into details.

The Block analyst Larry Cermak and technicalBitfinex director Paolo Ardoino expressed confidence that the vulnerability is in Twitter itself, so no one is protected by it. Also, fraudulent messages began to be posted from little-known accounts. Ardoino noted that he is probably not popular enough, because scammers do not write from his account.

“This attack is of huge scale and for many yearswill influence Twitter. Something should be done immediately, before the heads of state begin to post anything. This is very dangerous, ”wrote Cermak.

Before midnight Moscow time, Apple and Uber accounts were connected to the fraud. Cermak suggests Twitter to completely shut down its platform.

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Amazon founder and richest man's accountAccording to Forbes, Jeff Bezos also suffered. In his case, the scammers offered $ 50 million. Similar messages were published from the accounts of Kanye West, Michael Bloomberg and Bitcoin.

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Twitter shares fell more than 3% during the post-trading session.

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After 00:20 MSK has joined the account of US presidential candidate Joe Biden, commentators note. The message was quickly deleted. Warren Buffett's account message was posted and deleted in the same way.

Also, observers managed to fix a fraudulent message in the account of former US President Barack Obama.

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There have been calls to solve the problem by banning Bitcoin.

“You know, we wouldn't have to worry aboutthings like this if cryptocurrencies were outlawed. I am not kidding. Cryptocurrencies have no useful uses for society, but there are harmful ones. Why are they allowed? " - wrote the famous American journalist Josh Barro. He also does not understand why the Twitter platform is still not disabled.

Justin Sun announced that he would pay $ 1 million to help find the attackers. Meanwhile, YouTube blogger MrBeast and boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. have been hacked.

A few hours after the firstTwitter support responded to fraudulent messages: “We are aware of a security incident affecting Twitter accounts. We are investigating and taking action to correct it. We will publicly disclose updated information soon. ” An hour earlier, Twitter support posted a message about new platform features.

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson offered to look at the problem from a different angle:

"If the hack came from within Twitter itself, every private message on the platform could be downloaded and uploaded to the dark web."

Massive posts from high profile accounts have led to Bitcoin currently at the top of the Twitter Topics list across a number of regions.

Kim Kardashian has been added to the list of hacked accounts.

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