This archive report was first published on 18 July 2020.
July 18, 2020
A high-profile Twitter hack that targeted the accounts of Elon Musk, Joe Biden, and other prominent users was carried out by a group of young hackers with no links to state or organized crime, according to The New York Times.
The hackers, who were interviewed by the Times, were described as young people who got to know each other through their shared obsession with owning early or unusual screen names, particularly one letter or number, like @y or @6.
They claimed to have been involved in commandeering lesser-known Twitter accounts, particularly to swipe coveted short handles such as an "@" sign and single letters or numbers that could easily be sold.
However, the hackers maintained that they stopped serving as middlemen for the mastermind behind the scheme, known as "Kirk," when high-profile accounts became targets.
According to The New York Times, the hackers advertised account names at an OGusers.com website, asking for payment in bitcoin.
Twitter has confirmed that approximately 130 accounts were targeted by the attackers in some way as part of the incident, with a small subset of these accounts being taken over and used to send tweets.
Posts trying to dupe people into sending hackers the virtual currency bitcoin were tweeted by the official accounts of Apple, Uber, Kanye West, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, and many others on Wednesday.
More than $100,000 worth of bitcoin was sent to email addresses mentioned in the tweets, according to Blockchain.com, which monitors crypto transactions.
