Twitter Hack: the message against Bitcoin

The last few hours have been incredibly eventful as we have witnessed the biggest hack in Twitter history involving several accounts of the most famous influencers not only from the Bitcoin and crypto world but also public figures like Elon Musk and Bill Gates. 

Surely this kind of attack highlighted a big vulnerability of the platform and that a centralized system using third party systems is not secure.

In fact, all it took was a weak point in the structure to carry out the attack, regardless of the various protections that had been adopted. 

As reported, the tweets communicated the details of a classic scam which we have analyzed several times: for instance the one related to the PS5, in which the victim was invited to deposit Bitcoin (BTC) at an address to obtain twice as much as the amount sent. 

All of this was obviously false and did not lead to any positive result. Unfortunately, the addresses of the hackers collected a total of 12.8 BTC, more than 118 thousand dollars. 

If instead, we turn to the analysis of incoming transactions we can see that a user has made several of them to this address using specially created BTC addresses (we speak about vanity addresses) with very precise words:

“Just Read All

Transaction Outputs As Text

You Take Risk When Use Bitcoin

For Your Twitter Game

Bitcoin is Traceable

Why Not Monero”. 

The message is very clear and reminds us how, when using bitcoin to make transactions, they are public and show the relative balances and destinations of the funds, which implies the possibility to trace this data. 

The author of this message therefore wanted to highlight the so-called problem of transparency and lack of privacy of transactions, inviting to use Monero (XMR). 

The criminals who perpetrated the attack chose bitcoin as a form of payment not because it is the safest and most anonymous, but because they preferred to use the most well-known and widespread crypto. 

Now the situation seems to have been fixed, but the event has left a lot of questions, and it will certainly make people talk about it for much longer, bringing to light the need for a decentralized, trustless and possibly blockchain-based platform.

This concept was also emphasized by Daniel Larimer, CTO of Block.one, in relation to the arrival of the social network Voice.