A team of cybercriminals hacked the twitter accounts of some famous retail business accounts on twitter to promote another cryptocurrency giveaway scam. These include the twitter accounts of retail industry giants Target and The Body Shop. The hackers are believed to be poor in English writing as the scam messages are usually written in a poor language. The hackers targeted a number of verified Twitter accounts.
The tweet on Target’s Twitter account read:
After which a few hours later when the team realized that their account had been hacked, they posted another tweet stating that their account was inappropriately accessed for posting a bitcoin scam:
Early this morning, our Twitter account was inappropriately accessed. The access lasted for approx. half an hour & one fake tweet was posted during that time about a bitcoin scam. We have regained control of the account, are in close contact with Twitter & are investigating now.
— Target (@Target) November 13, 2018
Apart from Target, a number of other accounts such as The Body Shop, Universal Music Czech Republic, Toledo Rockets, the Agriculture, Horticulture Development Board and UNHCR Serbia account were also targetted by the hackers.
The hackers seem to be quite expert as it is quite surprising how a good number of verified Twitter accounts were all hacked at once. Earlier, the hackers used to clone the accounts rather than directly taking over the accounts.
In a recent case, a group of hackers had cloned the account of Cap Gemini Australia and replaced the name with Elon Musk and posted a similar bitcoin scam message stating that Elon Musk was giving away 10,000 BTC to all his community:
