The very foundations of Twitter are shaking today. After a massive attack was made on various celebrities and organizations in and out of the crypto world, gaining access to their accounts in an attempt to scam the crypto users‘ Bitcoins. However, after only a few hours, we wondered who was really behind the attack on Twitter.

Attempting to scam crypto currencies by hacking into celebrities on Twitter

The facts of the attack
Assigning responsibility after a cyber attack is an extremely complicated activity. For, in most cases, hackers have sophisticated enough means to hide their identity. Therefore, it is rarely possible to know if governments or criminal organizations are behind an attack.

So to try to make sense of today’s cyber attack we must start by analysing the facts. The attack on several celebrity Twitter accounts was not limited to political and financial figures such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Barack Obama. It affected dozens of accounts of influencers and organizations in the crypto world.

Thus, crypto influencers like Justin Sun or Changpeng Zhao, and companies like Bitqt, Coinbase and Ripple saw their Twitter accounts hacked today. This is one of the elements that lead to the questioning of the mechanism used by the attackers. Well, we must remember that these figures of the crypto world are also several of the individuals and organizations most concerned about their security on the Internet.

Therefore, the idea of a massive attack against so many accounts simultaneously, leads experts to question whether the security of individual accounts on Twitter was really violated. Or if, on the contrary, the attack was targeted and managed to penetrate the security of the social network infrastructure. Getting access to its database, and therefore to the users‘ data.

Who can hack Twitter?

In fact, information released by the specialized portal Vice, reveals that in recent hours, some Twitter users have been posting images of what appears to be the control panel used by the social network.

And although they have been removed from the platform, and the accounts that tweeted them suspended. These seem to prove that the attack was indeed carried out against the Twitter infrastructure.

This leads us to establish two key questions to understand who might be behind the attack. First, who has the resources to attack Twitter? And that is, let’s remember that the social network is one of the most important technology companies in the world. Therefore, although its size is not comparable to that of giants such as Google and Facebook, it does devote immense resources to ensuring its cyber security.

Thus, there are probably few institutions in the world, beyond banks and military organizations, with a level of security in their servers equivalent to that of companies like Twitter. So, while a breach in their security is not impossible, it is certainly quite difficult to believe that any criminal organization has the capabilities to easily threaten Twitter’s infrastructure.

And even stranger is the use of this access to the Twitter database to perform a simple scam. Also threatening accounts like those of President Obama or Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, which will attract a lot of media attention, diminishing the effectiveness of the scam. As a matter of fact, less than $200,000 was collected, thanks to the media coverage that put crypto users on alert.