Two days ago, Malaysia faced a meltdown. No, not the nuclear reactor type. It was mostly rage against TIME dotcom Malaysia. If you are a user, you would know that you could not have access to your internet on the 14th of July 2020 because there was some issues with TIME dotcom, one of Malaysia’s major internet service providers (ISP). For plenty of Malaysians working from home, this is a nightmare scenario. Internet was down for up to eight hours from the first reports at about 2.00 p.m. (correct us if we are wrong).
We are aware of a security incident impacting accounts on Twitter. We are investigating and taking steps to fix it. We will update everyone shortly.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 15, 2020
That was not a good day for TIME dotcom and their customers, me included. While that is a big deal, Twitter seems to have a bad day at the office too on the 15th of July 2020, yesterday. They had several accounts hacked, and then those accounts were used for a cryptocurrency scam.
The hacked accounts are not any random accounts though. The account holders of the hacked accounts are people like former United States Vice President, Joe Biden; former POTUS, Barrack Obama; Billionaire, Elon Musk; Microsoft Founder, Bill Gates; and even Apple’s own twitter account. These are all verified accounts, by the way.
The hackers then proceed to post promises of a double return of Bitcoins as long as anyone sends them a certain number of Bitcoins to them. Twitter has locked all the affected accounts once they found out about the breach. This was several hours after the hack and scam started.
According to Twitter, the hackers managed to use some of the internal tools that only employees have access to. They are suspecting also that the hack is targeted towards Twitter employees in this case. Most of the affected accounts are also accounts with a vast following number, understandable since they want your money.
Our investigation is still ongoing but here’s what we know so far:
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020
Still, twitter took responsibility and apologised to the millions on Twitter. There are no official numbers being released on how much has already been scammed, but there are estimates that the numbers have reached more than a few US$ hundred thousand in value. Twitter is currently still rectifying the issue and will issue an update very soon. You can keep up with the latest update on this issue via Twitter following Twitter Support’s account.