Twitter suffers massive bitcoin security breach

The security breach was used to promote a bitcoin scam that apparently managed to raise $120,000 worth of cryptocurrency revenue before being discovered. It’s the biggest attack in the company’s history and investigations are likely to begin shortly. Twitter will be scrambling to get things back on track as we speak and will need to seriously rethink its current security systems.

Even though this seems to have only been motivated by profit and a quick buck, the implications are seriously troubling. This attack was so large and so damaging that Twitter has had to lock hundreds of thousands of accounts in a move that The Verge described as being ‘as close to pulling the plug as possible’. Given that Twitter is one of the biggest public communication tools in the world, another more sinister attack could easily lead to political disrupt and compromised emergency health services.

Access to Trump’s Twitter account by hackers would be very worrying, regardless of whether or not you’re a fan of his usual online activity. Misspelling coffee at three in the morning is a very different ballgame to hackers sending North Korea threatening tweets that could cause an escalation in international tensions.

We don’t know how long it’ll take for Twitter to sort everything out, or how they’ll be changing their security measures moving forward. In an official statement it said that locking accounts was ‘an important step to reduce risk’, and is currently taking steps to ‘limit access to internal systems and tools while an investigation is ongoing’.

It may be worth changing your passwords and personal information today just to be safe – and if it wasn’t already obvious, don’t click on any bitcoin links on Twitter.