EAST LONGMEADOW, MA (WGGB/WSHM) — Chaos struck online yesterday when many prominent figures found themselves, victims of a clever hack, into their Twitter accounts.
Western Mass News caught up with a local expert for more on what went wrong and how you can protect your social media accounts.
“This is an unusual kind of hack,” said East Longmeadow’s Gogeeks Computer Rescue owner Stan Prager.
Dozens of the nation’s biggest names, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Kanye West, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk, were all victims of an unusual Twitter hack that posted similar messages on each account regarding a Bitcoin scam.
“Send us a bitcoin, and we’ll double it, so it’s a scam of some type, and once it was recognized, that these prominent men were all being targeted, with the same message, Twitter took it down,” Prager explained.
Prager told Western Mass News that this was an unusual, coordinated attack.
“Rather than them getting the passwords from these prominent individuals, they went in and managed to get engineers at Twitter, high-level engineers, who had access to the whole platform, they were able to hack them,” Prager explained.
He said the cryptocurrency scam generated thousands of dollars, and on Thursday, Twitter stock shares were down following the breach.
“It looks at first glance like they got $120,000 of bitcoin until this was shut down, it could be more, could be less, we don’t know for sure,” Prager said.
Prager told us the attack could have caused much more havoc, but the signs lead to a criminal culprit who made rookie errors.
“Was it state terrorism? Did it come from North Korea or Russia or something like that or was it just a criminal of some type, and right now, the thinking is that it was a criminal,” Prager explained.
Stan Prager said it’s important to constantly monitor your account, so you can be aware of any potential hackers.
“Given what happened here, you probably wanna monitor it if you have any social media accounts,” he said. “You want to monitor it and make sure that someone else hasn’t hijacked it and using it for various reasons.”
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