Emailed on July 17, 2020 in The Friday Forward

This week, bitcoin spammers appeared to hack the accounts of some of the most powerful people in the world—Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden, to name just a few—leading initially to lots of jokes but eventually to deep concern.

The message the hackers posted on these accounts was a typical crypto scam technique, TechCrunch reminds us. On Elon Musk’s compromised Twitter account, scammers said they’d double any bitcoin sent to an address, and the ploy was so simple it just did work. The address linked to the scam received more than $103,000 worth of bitcoin, CoinDesk reported. 

All things considered, it's a blessing the scammers only made out with that amount.

After hours of confusion and a muted response from the Twitter comms department, CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted, “Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened. We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.” Twitter stock fell 3% after hours.

Unfortunately this is a bad look for Twitter and certainly the worst security breach it’s ever suffered. Considering its central place in political, economic, and cultural discourse, the company has a huge mountain to climb to prove it can be trusted as a communication platform.