Twitter has apparently taken measures to prevent users from sharing strings of numbers and letters on the social media site following an attack by hackers Wednesday that resulted in the posting of bitcoin giveaway scams on the accounts of public figures including Joe Biden and Bill Gates.
The move is likely aimed at preventing would-be fraudsters from sharing cryptocurrency addresses – made up of a random string of letters and numbers – in a bid to solicit cryptocurrency from victims, The Block reports. Wednesday’s breach resulted in Twitter users sending more than $100,000 to the same bitcoin address shared by compromised accounts, all of which promised outside rewards for those who sent funds.
At the time of publication, tests conducted by The Block Research show Litecoin, XRP, Monero, bitcoin and Ethereuem addresses could not be shared.
Those trying to share such an address receive the following message: “This request looks like it might be automated. To protect our users from spam and other malicious activity, we can’t complete this action right now. Please try again later.”
Indeed, at least one popular account known for sharing address information – WhaleAlerts – has now said that it can’t post its messages to Twitter.
Due to anti-hack measures taken by Twitter the Whale Alert bot can no longer post any transfers and we cannot manually add them either. We hope Twitter will resolve the issue soon. Transfers are still being posted to our Telegram channel: https://t.co/vVRNZuovHX — Whale Alert (@whale_alert) July 16, 2020
As previously reported, Twitter has blamed a “coordinated social engineering attack” on Wednesday’s platform crisis, pursued by attackers “who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.”