The New York Department of Financial Services, or NYDFS, has released a lengthy report analyzing the impact of July’s high-profile Twitter hack, which resulted in the theft of over $118,000 worth of Bitcoin (BTC). Far beyond the immediate material impact, the NYDFS states that the incident exposed deep cybersecurity weaknesses of a publicly-traded social media company valued at $37 billion and counting over 330 million active monthly users. The discovery has serious consequences in light of the platform’s ever-expanding influence on both financial markets and the political sphere. Two key sections of the NYFDS report, published on Oct. 14, tackle …
Cybersecurity experts are warning that the Twitter hack on July 15 shows that the social network needs to strengthen its security in order to avoid a worse black swan scenario with serious consequences. In the most recent incident, attackers launched a crypto giveaway scam by posting phishing messages through the hijacked profiles of celebrities and high-ranked political personalities worldwide, collecting over 13 Bitcoin (BTC) from the victims. The attack could have been worse Ilya Sachkov, CEO of threat intelligence firm Group-IB, believes the attack demonstrated a “huge problem of low financial literacy and bad cyber hygiene.” He told Cointelegraph: “This …
Murphy’s law states: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” It always happens with centralized services. A year ago, we saw how half a million Facebook accounts were leaked online, exposing personal data. We will see it many times more with other services. The recent Twitter hack underscores this once again. The accounts of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Mike Bloomberg, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, among others, were hacked to push a fraudulent offer with Bitcoin (BTC). Writing for the BBC, cybersecurity commentator Joe Tidy opined: “The fact that so many different users have …
The Twitter hackers who compromised more than a dozen celebrity accounts on Wednesday appear to be consolidating their funds to an address that had earlier sent money to BitPay and Coinbase. According to research from Whitestream, a blockchain analytics company, three transactions originating from the “1Ai5” address lead to wallets associated with Coinbase and BitPay, both of which provide merchant solutions. The legacy address was the first to be offered by the hackers, who later switched to a Bech32 address when targeting non-crypto accounts. However, the original address is now the consolidation point of all the proceeds gotten through the …
The official Twitter account of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi got compromised earlier today, which was then used to share misleading information about the mainstream adoption of Bitcoin (BTC) and redistribution of 500 BTC among the Indian citizens. On Dec. 10, Modi said in a virtual event virtual summit hosted by US President Joe Biden that technologies such as cryptocurrencies should be used to empower democracy and not undermine it: “By working together, democracies can meet the aspirations of our citizens and celebrate the democratic spirit of humanity.” While the long-awaited Lok Sabha Winter Session, a parliamentary meetup intended to …