I am not usually one for conspiracy theories, but the things coming out thus far aren't really adding up...
As you are likely well aware of by now, there was a massive Twitter hack that took place yesterday where numerous high profile Twitter accounts were briefly taken over.
They tweeted out messages asking people to send them bitcoin in exchange for more bitcoin being sent back in return. You know, the typical bitcoin scam tweets we have seen on Twitter for years now.
They looked something like this:
(Source: https://twitter.com/barackobama?lang=en)
Or this:
(Source: https://twitter.com/KimKardashian)
Somehow that typo in that one above seems to add to its legitimacy...
The official story...
According to what we are hearing thus far the hack was pretty small compared to what it really could have been.
Nothing is official as of yet, but these are the details thus far...
- Someone at Twitter was bribed for access to the accounts
- The hackers were able to gain control over some very high profile accounts via the employee
- Roughly $135k worth of BTC was sent to the hackers wallets
That's basically it at this point.
I'm not sure about you, but that seems pretty small potatoes to me.
And it appears I am not the only one feeling that way...
(Source: ~~~ embed:1283837229677178880) twitter metadata:Q2Vybm92aWNofHxodHRwczovL3R3aXR0ZXIuY29tL0Nlcm5vdmljaC9zdGF0dXMvMTI4MzgzNzIyOTY3NzE3ODg4MCl8 ~~~
Couldn't have said it better myself!
What could have been...
The hack may seem pretty bad on first glance, but it really is nothing compared to what it could have been.
Think about it for a second.
What if these hackers had gained access to some accounts of world leaders and coordinated tweets about an impending economic collapse, a run on the banks, a global food shortage, or even worse, a nuclear war...
The damage that might have caused would have been orders of magnitude worse that we saw, and likely a lot more profitable for the hackers.
I mean they risked their freedom for a $100k?! That doesn't make sense to me...
My guess is they also had derivative positions that netted far more money than what they were able to make from the bitcoin scam, possible in Twitter's stock.
Which just so happened to be down a couple percentage points on the news.
Even with short term out of the money puts though, that is small potatoes compared with what they could have done.
I mean imagine the kind of stock market reaction had multiple world leaders tweeted about impending nuclear war... markets would have crashed in seconds...
So, while the news continues to trickle out as to exactly what happened here, my guess is it was a lot bigger than what we are hearing initially, and we may not even hear the full details for some time yet, heck, if ever.
Either way, I am not buying the 'bribe and make off with $100k' story that is being pushed right now.
Stay informed my friends.
-Doc
Posted Using LeoFinance
I do find it a bit odd. Because the damage they could have done would be so much greater. Perhaps it is just a trial before a bigger event? Or a proof-of-concept. Though I do not understand why they will want to take so much of a risk for that.
Yep, my thoughts as well.
everything is a conspiracy right now it seems!
Posted Using LeoFinance
I don't subscribe to most of them, but this one is interesting to me...
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The official story here is full of holes.
Agreed.
Doesn't make sense to pay that much to get in but to not use grammar check.
Perhaps, though the typo made it look more real actually. :)
Yes, this scenario is really scary, also reminds us not to believe everything we read online and double check. But I am sure in such a scenario, there would be an instant response on every channel, that the tweets were fake and maybe they would even shutdown the whole twitter site in such a case.
Yep, I can't imagine what would have happened... markets would have reacted for sure.
Exactly, I felt that too. Why would someone risk their life for $100k. Especially if they can hack twitter. Because people of their caliber can make a lot more.
I have one more theory though. I have seen a couple of posts/interviews about people running the scam ethereum bots on twitter. And these people make around $3000-$5000 a month(during bull market of 2017).
So, it could be possible that they were the exact same people, thought that if they can get access to famous personalities, they can score a big amount. Probably $1m something.
But they over-expected things and end up in loss.
I mean nobody would have expected that people would send them $130k or something. Right?
Even that's a big amount. So, they might have expected to make a big score out of it. They just didn't planned it right. They could have made a fake ICO page, and hyped up through all those profile. More people would have believed it I think.
Anyway, it's a mystery unless someone solves it. And I feel the way this event is losing its hype and didn't affected the price of bitcoin much, I think not much progress will be there further.
At some point we will probably find out exactly what happened, but I do think there is a decent change it is a bit more complex than the initial reports.
I read a couple of reports after I commented. There was an underground group of hackers, using sim swapping tricks. They hacked Jack Dorsey's account some time ago.
So, they got credentials of some key employees of twitter. Shared the loopholes of system among several hacker groups and a couple of them coordinated this hack.
Sounds interesting to me. We will find out more in a few days I guess.
Those funds are visible on the Blockchain right? We can see where they go?.
(Please, Someone with more Blockchain cred than me please reply, thanks.)
I don't think this was about the money.
I don't know what it WAS about but I don't think primary objective was the BTC.
Yep, agreed.