Twitter Hack Thwarted by Coinbase Intervention

Last week, Twitter suffered a major attack in which the accounts of many public figures and large companies were compromised. Victims included Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Apple, Uber, and cryptocurrency exchanges like CoinDesk, Binance, and Gemini, among others.

The attackers used their access to these high-profile accounts to launch a fake Bitcoin giveaway. Following a classic scam scheme, they impersonated celebrities and major companies, asking followers to send them a small amount of cryptocurrency with the promise to double and return any amount received.

Details of the Investigation

Preliminary results of the investigation show that 130 accounts were affected. For 45 of these, passwords were successfully reset and the accounts were fully compromised. In 8 cases, the attackers downloaded all available account data using the “Your Twitter Data” feature. Interestingly, none of these 8 accounts were verified (they did not have the blue checkmark).

Unfortunately, even in 2020, many people believed that Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and other well-known figures and companies were suddenly giving away Bitcoin. Since the same messages and a single Bitcoin wallet were used for all hacked accounts, it’s clear that the scammers “earned” about 13 BTC, or roughly $120,000.

Coinbase Blocks Further Losses

However, it has now come to light that this amount could have been much higher. In an interview with Forbes, Coinbase’s Chief Information Security Officer Philip Martin revealed that, upon noticing the attack and scam messages on Twitter, Coinbase staff immediately took action. Specifically, Coinbase prevented 1,100 customers from sending a total of 30.4 BTC (about $280,000 at the current rate) to the scammers’ address.

According to Martin, only 14 Coinbase users managed to send Bitcoin to the scammers (totaling about $3,000) before Coinbase blacklisted the wallet address.

Other exchanges, including Gemini, Kraken, and Binance, also reported blocking transfers to the hackers’ wallet, though their users made far fewer transaction attempts compared to Coinbase users.

Concerns About Censorship

Forbes notes that blacklisting certain addresses—even those used by scammers and criminals—has sparked discussions in the crypto community about potential censorship by major exchanges and trading platforms.