July 2020 "I Am Giving Back" Twitter Hack

About

The July 2020 "I Am Giving Back" Twitter Hack refers to a mass hacking of verified Twitter accounts that occurred on July 15th, 2020. The hack scammed people by using accounts to tell their followers they were "giving back to the community," asking for Bitcoin donations and promising to double the amount sent to a provided address. The hack is Twitter's biggest security breach since its creation. The source of the hack stems from a Twitter employee who was allegedly convinced by the hackers to help them hijack the accounts by using an internal admin tool.

Origin

At around 3 p.m. Eastern time, hackers gained access to several Twitter accounts and began directing people to send Bitcoin to an address, promising to return double whatever amount was sent. The majority of these posts used similar language including the message, "I am giving back to the community due to COVID-19! All Bitcoin sent to my address below will be sent back doubled. If you send $1,000, I will send back $2,000! Only doing this for the next 30 minutes! Enjoy." The hackers gained access to numerous accounts, including Kanye West's Twitter to send one such tweet (shown below), which has since been deleted.

Developments

After the attacks began, #hacked and #twitterhacked trended on Twitter, as the hackers targeted celebrities, companies and cryptocurrency industry members. People and companies targeted include:

According to Blockchain Explorer,^[1] the address linked in the tweets received its first recorded transaction at 3:03 p.m. Eastern time, with roughly 381 total transactions and 12.86811455 BTC ($117,271.37) received in less than 24 hours.

At 5:45 p.m., the Twitter Support^[2] account tweeted that they were aware of the issue (shown below) and attempting to fix it. At around 6:15 p.m., Twitter^[3] then disabled tweeting for all verified accounts.

At 10:38 p.m., Twitter Support^[4] released another series of tweets(seen below) that provided information on how the hackers were able to gain access to the accounts and said, "We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools."

According to Vice,^[5] who said they spoke with hackers involved in the attack, "at least some of the accounts appear to have been compromised by changing the email address associated with them using the tool," which was provided by a Twitter insider. One of these sources stated in the article that, "We used a rep that literally done all the work for us."

Online Reactions and Parodies

On July 15th as the attacks swept the platform, several users also poked fun at the incident through jokes or memes, such as Twitter^[6] user AramKurdii, who posted a Stonks meme as a reaction to Obama's hacked tweet. The meme (seen below) received nearly 700 likes.

Twitter^[7] user bry_campbell also poked fun about the hacks at 5:45 p.m., receiving over 58,800 likes and 8,700 retweets and comments for his tweet (shown below).

Some of the other accounts on Twitter who weren't affected by the attack also began posing parodies of the tweets with fake Bitcoin addresses. At 5:41 p.m., the Wendy's Twitter^[8] account posted one such parody (seen below) with address "Dave444spicy245nuggets10piece," receiving over 14,800 likes and 3,800 retweets and comments. The eBaum's World Twitter^[9] account similarly posted a parody with the address "youreadumbfuckifyoudsendmoneytorandomaccounts."

Search Interest

External References