The great Twitter hack

Yesterday, Twitter was hacked. Many influential figures including Elon Musk, Barack Obama, and Bill Gates tweeted and asked individuals to send Bitcoin to an account in which they promised to return the favor and pay back double.

News today revealed a lot of rumors including that this was possibly an inside job by a Twitter employee and that about $120,000 was lost to the scam. Yes, $120,000 not million. I’m by no means saying this is not a large sum of money, but for an elaborate scam, this was pennies.

Consider this. These hacker(s) devised a plan to hack into one of the largest social media companies in the world. Not only that, they were able to get into the accounts of some of the top Twitter accounts in the world. This was not just an elaborate scheme, but a very impressive one that could not have been thought up by some amateur hackers. These hacker(s) are impressive to say the least.

These presumably brilliant hackers came up with this scheme and the best they could do was Tweet the following:

Holy hell. For an elaborate scheme this complicated, the best they could do was Tweet the same message asking people to send them Bitcoin. In the day and age where a single tweet can send a firestorm through the stock market or much simpler, create enough fomo to have people buy an absurd amount of goods, they decided to do this.

We dodged a bullet. These hackers may have been brilliant in many ways, but man are they god awful at the business side of things.

The scary part behind all this is how much worse this could have been. Yes, much more money could have been lost. But Twitter is one of the most important platforms in shaping global politics today. If these dumb-brained hackers orchestrated this joke scheme, imagine what some real hackers may be able to accomplish one day.