Widespread Twitter hack hits Barack Obama, Elon Musk

A widespread Twitter hack affected Barack Obama, Elon Musk, and cryptocurrency accounts. Yahoo Finance’s Dan Roberts shares the details.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: Dan Roberts joins us now. And where is the investigation of how this all happened focusing? Something on the inside?

DAN ROBERTS: It sounds like that, Adam. It sounds like you could call it an inside job, you know? According to "Vice," which had the earliest reports on this, last night at 1:00 AM, the hackers convinced a Twitter employee to give them the keys to the kingdom. And Twitter has commented on that. Hard to kind of deny that report, although Twitter's comment is that we're investigating whether the employee gave the hackers access or accessed the accounts him or herself. Obviously, a key difference there, but either way, a problem from the inside.

Now of course, people who already have a lot of problems with Twitter and have raised problems in the past are pointing to this story to say that, you know, there's a management issue. Because if an employee can get access that easily-- and "Vice" is suggesting in its report that in some cases, the Twitter employee or the hackers were able to change the email address associated with accounts, and that's how they were able to then send tweets from those big, big accounts. We're talking about you know, Bill Gates. We're talking about the official account of the crypto exchange, Binance, Elon Musk. You know, these are some of the biggest verified accounts on Twitter.

People are already saying, well, if that's even possible, then that's a problem. Now, of course, my thinking there is, well, we've always known that of course these companies can access your account. And in many cases, they need you for certain reasons. I'm not defending at all what happened. But it's just interesting to me, because the first reaction a lot of people have here is, oh, you know, Jack Dorsey's got to go. But not surprising to me to think that there are people at social media companies you use that if they need you, can access your account.

- Dan, I want to ask about the crypto angle of this. Because I know you cover that also. And you know, there have been crypto scams before, right? It seemed like it was pretty quickly apparent that this was a hacking, right? But did they snare people in this attempt?

DAN ROBERTS: Yeah, so I've written about this. These types of tweets-- you know, I'm giving away X number of bitcoin, or send me ether at this web address, this wallet address, and I'll send you double the amount of ether. First of all, you would think that they look so absurd that no one falls for it, but people do. I mean, otherwise, scammers wouldn't do it, right? Occasionally, these have worked.

And they have hit major accounts in the past, including Elon Musk. What's confusing is he at times has tweeted about cryptocurrency himself, you know, real tweets from him. So that's why the line gets kind of blurred. But Elon Musk's account, at one point, Tim Cook's account, and Jeff Bezos's account, and in fact, most notably, President Donald Trump's account, at points in the past-- in 2018, there was real rash of these-- have had tweets like this come from their account. These hackers were able to get access.

Now usually, it involves two-factor authentication. What happens is, you know, you get sent a text, and you foolishly send back your password, because you think the text is from Twitter, or in many cases, from your cell phone provider, you know, whether it's Verizon, AT&T. You send your password. The hacker that logs into your account and changes the cell phone number associated with the password. So once they have access to your phone, you're in big trouble.

So the crypto scams are nothing new. And it's interesting, too, because people in the cryptocurrency world interpret it one of two ways. First of all, there are the people who say that whenever you see headlines come out, oh, more bad news for Bitcoin. Well, you know, as if it reflects on the technology of Bitcoin, or the progress of that space, that there are scammers? Of course there are, you know? And then there are people who-- I've already been pitched today stories from people in the crypto world saying, oh, great day for Bitcoin, because look at all the mentions on social media of Bitcoin. Well, of course, but they're a scam!

ADAM SHAPIRO: But before we-- I mean, it sure looks like it was some kind of Bitcoin deal, scam. But when Twitter says social engineering attack, should we read anything into how they're terming this?

DAN ROBERTS: Not necessarily. I think that they're investigating how this happened. Now when you say social engineering, I mean, you know, maybe this is sort of the next step of this. But another problem that's come out of this is that the screenshots that were reported by "Vice" of the internal tool that was used inside Twitter to pull off this hack also reveals that there are accounts and topics that are labeled trends blacklist.

And unfortunately, you're now going to quickly see that fuel a kind of three-year-old conservative Trump-led conspiracy which is that Twitter shadowbans certain accounts or blacklists certain trends from becoming trending topics. That's kind of a side effect here. But when you talk about the social engineering, I mean, that's going to be the next part of this conversation, the problems at Twitter, not just because this hack was able to happen, but the problems with what Twitter chooses to filter out, you know? Is it a publisher or not?