on the crypto
A cyber attack that recently hit Twitter sparked widespread debate about tech sector regulations and borderless money. So far the scam has raised $ 120.000 in bitcoins thanks to a fake giveaway campaign based on the spread of some tweets.
Educate the social media audience
On Thursday morning, many authentic Twitter accounts could no longer tweet bitcoin addresses (find out how buy bitcoins with PayPal), although the QR codes still worked. "As far as I can tell from the evidence I see right now, the attackers didn't understand the value of the information they had," said ClearSky CEO Boaz Dolev.
“We need to find a way to create a more resilient audience that doesn't believe that everything they see in a certain format is true. It is a new era in which we need new tools to understand what is true. " Among over 375 million followers, the hacked accounts lost only 421 bitcoin transactions, of which only 17 of those transactions valued at over $ 1.000.
About half of the transactions come from North American accounts. The evidence gathered so far suggests that attackers are well-informed about cryptocurrency culture. According to the investigation, "Fraudsters have a history of gambling on BitMEX and Coinbase," said the privacy team behind Samourai Wallet.
Uninformed hackers
Yet despite being clearly crypto veterans, the attackers haven't used some of the best bitcoin privacy technologies available. Samourai Wallet said that so far none of the 12,8 BTC appears to have been treated with the company's WhirlPool tool or any other unattended CoinJoin software.
Rather, hackers have used centralized exchange accounts, such as BitMEX, in the past. "Hackers used a single address, which probably reduced earnings by facilitating traceability," said Ma.
"Many exchanges including Coinbase, Kraken and Gemini have already blacklisted the address and derived addresses as the hacker tries to take out the funds." Bálint Harmat, co-CEO of Wasabi Wallet manufacturer zkSNACKs, said: “We took a quick look at the addresses. At the moment they are not connected to Wasabi CoinJoin. "
Even using the same bitcoin addresses, experts may misinterpret the data. Both Ma and the Samourai Wallet team described bitcoin transactions as simple, sometimes even as a single hop. In the end, all parties agreed that there is no mixing test.
Wider implications
Legacy brands and celebrities may have the resources to manage public broadcasting, but few media outlets do it. Dolev of ClearSky said that the most interesting implications of the attack will not be related to bitcoin itself.
Rather, it should be noted how this will affect the communication infrastructure on which so many markets are based, including that of cryptocurrencies. "We can learn a lot about what banks are doing to protect themselves from fraud and there is a lot of similarity between fraud and this type of hack," said Dolev. "We will have to see what Twitter will do to protect the accounts and also what Facebook and other social networks will do."
