This week, Twitter has been hit with a massive influx of Bitcoin scamming. Bad actors are attempting to make their scams more appealing through the social platform via impersonation and outright hacking of celebrity and company accounts. Now, it seems, the G Suite Twitter account has been hacked, making Google the latest to have an account fall victim to the ridiculous scheme.
This scam started with the creation of accounts intended to impersonate Elon Musk, before moving on to hacking larger companies like Target. The setup for each of the tweets is the same: a major company is supposedly giving away a total of 10000 Bitcoins (over $60 million) to participants who first send “the company” between 0.1 and 0.2 Bitcoins ($600 to $1200). Participants are promised to receive anywhere from 1 to 20 Bitcoins ($6000 – $120,000) in return.
This afternoon, The Next Web is reporting, Google’s official G Suite Twitter account, @gsuite, was briefly hacked, displaying a near identical scam. It seems the scammers were also able to tap into Google’s Twitter advertising budget by promoting the tweet. Humorously, despite putting in the effort to hack an official Google account, the original, Tesla-related, scam URL is used (censored below).
Image: @shawnroos
9to5Google’s Take
I doubt that this G Suite Twitter hack could have happened if the account was properly secured with two factor authentication, like all Google employee accounts are supposed to be. Perhaps Google’s social media manager should pick up a Titan Security Key.
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