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Twitter is Struggling To Contain the Bitcoin Scam Outbreak (usatoday.com)
Google's official G Suite Twitter account is the latest victim of an ongoing bitcoin scam that has been plaguing the social media platform for the last few weeks. Earlier on Wednesday, Target saw a similar hack. From a report: G Suite might be the highest-profile target of the scam yet, which saw fake, promoted tweets that appeared to originate from the G Suite account pop up in users' timelines this afternoon, directing them toward a scammy bitcoin address as part of a "giveaway." From another report: The hackers have also hacked other high-profile accounts and made similar pledges, Twitter confirmed. In multiple cases, they have impersonated Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and made a similar bitcoin pledge. To do so, they installed Musk's Twitter photo on the verified Twitter accounts they hacked and changed the accounts' display name to his. Musk's genuine Twitter account has not been compromised. In this incident, the scammers direct unsuspecting Twitter users to click on a giveaway link and to send bitcoin payments to them. By sending a certain amount, users are dubiously promised more bitcoin in return. Victims are also promised a chance at winning more. In some cases, the hackers have apparently paid Twitter to promote the ads. It was not immediately clear why Twitter was not able to stop those promotions from occurring.
For starters..... make Two Factor Authentication using a hardware token such as Gsec token a mandatory requirement for enabling the Verified mark........ Secondly compromise of an official Google account makes one suspect exploitation of some kind of hole in Twitter's systems; mainly b/c Google goes the extra mile in regards to security ---- its difficult to imagine anyone could have scammed G suite creds from them easily. Also the sudden serial compromises of multiple other high-profile Twitter accounts that hadn't happened before? Very suspicious.
It really takes so very little to trigger a rightwinger these days.
Sorry, baby boys, the world is no longer a giant safe place for white male mediocrity!