It started with a phone call, moved on to scamming unsuspecting victims out of Bitcoin, and ended in the arrests of three people, including a Florida teenager.
The July 15 hijacking of about 130 high-profile and verified Twitter accounts, including those of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, scammed dozens of people out of about $120,000 worth of bitcoin. The incident, which gained worldwide attention, contained a bit of everything, including a celebrity element and questions about the reliability of messages posted on one of the world’s largest social media platforms.
The arrests of a 17-year-old and two others in connection with the hacking case by the U.S. Justice Department and state prosecutors in Florida also reveal how rather basic hacking techniques, such as phone phishing and SIM swapping, can affect the security of an entire organization, leaving employees and internal resources open to attack.
“We still don’t know exactly what happened with Twitter, however, they’ve acknowledged that the incident was started by a phone spear phishing attack,” Hank Schless, a senior manager for security solutions at Lookout, told Dice….
