Twitter and the big bitcoin scam: what happened next – The Verge

You can now download your Twitter data again and see what hackers could’ve nabbed

2020-09-03T17:10:30-04:00

If you're curious what kind of data Twitter stores on you - and what those hackers could have stolen during their big bitcoin scam - you can now find out once again. Twitter has reenabled the ability to download archives of "Your Twitter Data," nearly two months after shutting off the feature as a precaution against further hacking.

To access it, go to Settings > Account > Your Twitter data and you should see a screen like the one below, where you'll need to type in your password to start the transfer. If you're using a phone app, it may shove you over to the mobile website instead.

It also might take a while before the archive is ready: I …

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Twitter hack conspirators may include a 16-year-old from Massachusetts

2020-09-02T13:09:03-04:00

The investigation of the unprecedented Twitter hack earlier this summer has produced a new suspect: a 16-year-old from Massachusetts, according to a new report from The New York Times. This new suspect would be the youngest of the group of conspirators spanning the US and the UK, a group now totaling four individuals who together planned and then pulled off account takeovers of dozens of high-profile Twitter users to promote a bitcoin scam.

It's still unclear which members had direct control of internal Twitter systems and how exactly they gained access beyond somehow tricking company employees, but the supposed mastermind of the hack is be …

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Alleged Twitter teen hacker’s hearing got zoombombed big time

2020-08-05T14:42:14-04:00

Last Friday, a 17-year-old Florida high school graduate, Graham Ivan Clark, was arrested and charged as the "mastermind" behind the massive bitcoin scam that ensnared the accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Apple, and more - after he allegedly posed as a member of Twitter's IT department and used Twitter's own admin tools to break into those accounts.

This morning, I woke up early to hear what he - or his lawyer - had to say about that. It was so easy I didn't even have to get to a desk. The court had publicly revealed last week it'd hold hearings over Zoom, no password required, so I tuned in with my phone from bed …

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Go read this investigation into the troubled past of alleged Twitter hacker

2020-08-03T06:50:03-04:00

On Friday Graham Ivan Clark was charged along with two others for the most serious hack in Twitter's history, where numerous high-profile accounts including those of Elon Musk, Barack Obama, and Bill Gates were taken over to promote a bitcoin scam. In a new investigation, The New York Times has delved into Clark's history, which reportedly escalated from small Minecraft scams into a hack so big that some have dubbed it a global security crisis.

Here's how it all began, as described by the NYT:

Millions of teenagers play the same video games and interact in the same online forums as Mr. Clark. But what emerges in interviews with more than a …

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Three people have been charged for Twitter’s huge hack, and a Florida teen is in jail

2020-07-31T19:08:00-04:00

Early on July 31st, the FBI, IRS, US Secret Service, and Florida law enforcement placed 17-year-old Graham Clark of Tampa, Florida, under arrest. He's accused of being the "mastermind" behind the biggest security and privacy breach in Twitter's history, one that took over the accounts of President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Apple, and more to perpetrate a huge bitcoin scam on July 15th.

Apparently, he wasn't alone: shortly after the Tampa arrest was revealed and after we published this story, two more individuals were formally charged by the US Department of Justice: 22-year …

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Twitter says a spear phishing attack led to the huge bitcoin scam

2020-07-30T21:29:18-04:00

Twitter provided an update about the unprecedented July 15th attack that allowed hackers to tweet from some of the most high-profile accounts on the service, in a blog post and a series of tweets published Thursday evening. Twitter now says that a few employees were targeted in a phone spear phishing attack. While Twitter doesn't quite say, that presumably means hackers called up Twitter employees while posing as colleagues or members of Twitter's own security team, and got them to reveal the credentials they use to access internal systems.

Twitter had previously said its own tools were compromised in the attack, but up until this point, th …

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Years before big hack, Twitter contractors reportedly spied on celebs, including Beyoncé

2020-07-27T18:16:21-04:00

Years before the July 15th attack on Twitter that let hackers compromise some of the social network's most high-profile accounts to tweet Bitcoin scams, Twitter contractors apparently were able to use Twitter's internal tools to spy on some celebrities, including Beyoncé, according to a report from Bloomberg chronicling longtime security concerns at the company.

The tools in question typically allow certain Twitter staffers to do things like reset accounts or respond to content violations, but they could apparently also be used to spy on or hack an account, according to Bloomberg. "The controls were so porous that at one point in 2017 and 2 …

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Twitter says hackers accessed the DMs of one elected official in last week’s attack

2020-07-22T20:51:40-04:00

Twitter believes the perpetrators of last week's unprecedented attack on the company accessed the direct message (DM) inbox of an elected official in the Netherlands, the company said Wednesday evening. The revelation comes as part of the company's ongoing investigation into last Thursday's attack that allowed attackers to hijack the accounts of some of the service's most high-profile users, including politicians Barack Obama and Joe Biden, to tweet a bitcoin scam.

Although Twitter didn't name the Dutch official, local media reported last week that far-right, anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders, had his account hacked, retweeting a number o …

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Coinbase says it halted more than $280,000 in bitcoin transactions during Twitter hack

2020-07-20T14:08:56-04:00

The cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase said that it stopped around 1,100 customers from sending bitcoin to hackers who gained access to high-profile Twitter accounts last week.

Last Wednesday, over 100 Twitter accounts, some belonging to major companies like Apple and high-profile people like Vice President Joe Biden and Bill Gates, were hacked as part of a massive coordinated bitcoin scam. According to Twitter, the hackers were able to convince some of the company's employees to use internal systems and tools to access the accounts and help the hackers defraud users into sending them bitcoin.

According to Forbes, Coinbase and other cryptoc …

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Read Twitter’s update on the huge hack — 8 accounts may have had private messages stolen

2020-07-18T00:38:45-04:00

On Friday evening, Twitter issued its first full blog post about what happened after the biggest security lapse in the company's history, one that led to attackers getting hold of some of the highest profile Twitter accounts in the world - including Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, President Barack Obama, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Kanye West, Michael Bloomberg, and more.

The bad news: Twitter has now revealed that the attackers may indeed have downloaded the private direct messages (DMs) of up to 8 individuals while conducting their Bitcoin scam, and were able to see "personal information" including p …

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