Twitter suffers a major celeb hack (that could have gone way worse)
What Elon, Kim K, and Biden have in common... All got Twitter-hacked on Wednesday. It started with an Elon tweet (doesn't it always?). But this Elon tweet was almost too strange: "doubling all payments sent to my Bitcoin address." Then the Bitcoin-scammy tweets started coming from Bill Gates. Then came a wave of Bitcoin-scammy tweets from: Barack, Jeff Bezos, Kanye, Apple, and Uber (among others). Then, there was silence...
- For the 1st time ever, Twitter took the extreme step of blocking new tweets from all verified users on Twitter (aka, silencing the blue checkmarks).
- Twitter blamed social engineering. Employees had access to high-profile accounts and were tricked into sharing. But Vice reports that a Twitter employee knowingly helped hackers in exchange for payment. Truth still TBD.
- $120K: What the hackers got from this high-profile crypto scam.
Yet this could have gone 100000X worse... Twitter is at the very heart of breaking news, government policy, and market-moving comms. President Trump's account wasn't hacked, but this breach makes you wonder if it could be. Imagine the market and political response if the hackers had sent...
- A tweet from Trump declaring war on a country
- A tweet from Elon saying he's quitting Tesla
- Tweets from Uber and Bezos saying Amazon is acquiring Uber
- Tweets from Biden and Kanye saying they're running together
The Twitter trust is bruised... However this hack was orchestrated, it reveals that Twitter was/is vulnerable. Now the world is questioning the security of its systems. Lawmakers are knocking down Twitter's door to get clarity on how this could happen and why it wasn't stopped sooner (it took hours to block compromised accounts). Some public figures/companies might even quit Twitter as their go-to platform for breaking announcements. All of that would hurt user metrics, ad sales, and profits.