Twitter Bitcoin hack 2020: What we know so far

For a very confusing half-hour (or more), several major Twitter accounts had messages posted that indicated they'd double any amount of Bitcoin sent to a certain Bitcoin wallet – or through a sort of charity website that also seemed to link to a questionable Bitcoin wallet. At approximately 4:45 PM Central Time, Twitter Support began to go public with their response to the situation.

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.

— Support (@Support) July 15, 2020

There's a bit of a mislead in the news at the moment, where sources are suggesting that individual companies and celebrities were hacked. In reality, Twitter's confirmed that it wasn't said brands and celebrities that were hacked, it was a set of Twitter employees. And they weren't hacked, they were, as Twitter suggests, likely the target of a "coordinated social engineering attack."

We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.

— Support (@Support) July 16, 2020

This basically implies that malicious parties were able to gain access to the administration tools Twitter uses to edit their own website. As it seemed to be with the celebrity photo leak of 2016, it was more likely a matter of tricking humans into giving up their passwords than it was breaking in to Twitter accounts one-by-one.

"Internally, we've taken significant steps to limit access to internal systems and tools while our investigation is ongoing," wrote Twitter Support. "More updates to come as our investigation continues."

Tracing Bitcoin transactions associated with the Bitcoin wallet in question we see several large amounts sent to different addresses throughout the day, moved in and out of wallets that have only a pair of transactions (one in, one out), eventually reaching wallets associated with "Dark Web", Onion addresses, and the like. Basically the money disappears into the ether.