Hacker Hacked Elon Musk’s Twitter, Offers Free Cryptocurrency

Elon Musk, CEO & co-founder of Tesla, lead designer of SpaceX and co-founder of PayPal became the victim of hacking attacks on Twitter. One impersonator hacked Tesla Chairman and CEO Elon Musk’s official Twitter account with a fake verified account and offered his 22.5 million followers free Bitcoin and ethereum cryptocurrencies. According to Twitter’s impersonation policy, it is a violation of the Twitter Rules and twitter accounts portraying another person in a confusing or deceptive manner may be permanently suspended. Despite Twitter trying to ban hackers/scammers and impersonators on its platform, one impersonator hacked Tesla Chairman and CEO Elon Musk’s official account on Thursday.

The hacker wrote in a fake statement in the name of Elon Musk,

As many of you know by now, we will soon be making Tesla a private company. It is an important step towards stability and it would be impossible to move forward in a desirable pace without making such decisions. As a part of reorganization we will be introducing Bitcoin and Ethereum as official payment methods.

There are some people on Twitter who have accused Elon Musk of stealing cryptocurrencies from people.

This is not the first time that hackers have targeted Tesla. In the month of February, a group of attackers were able to break the security of Tesla’s Amazon cloud server and mine digital currency through it. Besides, it additionally enabled them to get to the organization’s exceedingly delicate information, for example, telemetry. Researchers at California based Cloud threat defense company RedLock had discovered that hackers compromised Tesla’s Amazon cloud account to mine cryptocurrency. Researchers said that hackers figured out how to get into the administration console for Tesla’s Kubernetes account since it wasn’t password protected. Kubernetes is an open-source framework composed by Google for upgrading cloud applications. As per RedLock’s researchers, the incident was found while searching for publically uncovered Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers and one of them ended up being of Tesla, open for public use without any password. In this attack, hackers used cryptojacking technique to mine cryptocurrency. They also concealed the genuine IP address of the mining pool server behind CloudFlare,a free content delivery network (CDN) service and because of that they were able to use new IP address on-demand by registering for free CDN services. Cryptojacking is defined as the use of computing device to mine cryptocurrency. In short, it is installing a program that secretly mines cryptocurrency. It uses JavaScript on a web page to mine for cryptocurrencies.

Twitter has witnessed such attacks in the past that use fraudulent accounts to trick people into sending them cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum. The accounts of many big people like Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, and cybersecurity expert John McAfee, have been impersonated by hackers – with a fake Twitter-verified status. The impact of this hack on followers of Elon Musk has not been able to be traced yet via followers who may have fallen prey to this hack. However, Twitter quickly responded to the hack on Musk by issuing a statement on The Verge,

We’re aware of this form of manipulation and are proactively implementing a number of signals to prevent these types of accounts from engaging with others in a deceptive manner.

At present, there are 100s of accounts that have been hacked on Twitter. The hackers have been able to find various ways to attract the victims for cryptocurrency fraud and Twitter has not been able to prevent such scams or hacks. This is not the first time anything like this hack has taken place. 

Few days ago, Duo Security, an Austin based cybersecurity company had disclosed a huge and sophisticated botnet crypto fraud scam On Twitter. The company discovered a massive botnet composed of more than 15,000 accounts which were trying to scam users on the social networking service. Duo security researchers used Twitter generated user IDs and gathered a dataset of 88 million public Twitter profiles represented in the Twitter API, such as screen name, tweet count, followers/following counts, avatar and description. In this research, Duo security gathered 19 million accounts via the streaming API, averaging approximately 940,000 accounts per day. After gathering the dataset, company started the process of identifying bot accounts.

Musk himself has been a victim of impersonation in the past. In February, a fake Elon Musk Twitter account had announced that it was giving out 400 ETH to fans. People who follow Twitter accounts of celebrities should stay away from such scams by ignoring ‘Free giveaway of crypto’ tweets.

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