Broadcasts.com - "Welcome! Twitter Bitcoin Scam plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN" (Craig Peterson

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: You've probably heard about the big problems happening for the big names out there. Uncle Joe's giving away millions, Elon Musk.

That's what we're going to start by talking about. How could he miss this? Right. It happened on Wednesday this week. I talked about it Thursday morning on the radio, a few different places, in fact, and hopefully, you might have picked it up on my podcast too.

Twitter is in quite the uproar right now because of this particular little problem. Many, many people are very, very upset and they're upset because. Twitter got hacked.

Now, this isn't hacked in the normal terms, right? Normally when you think of hack, you think of oh there are bad guys and they're maybe trying to hit the router and trying to get in through the router and trying to take over everything.

[00:01:00] It looks like what happened here, is that a few famous people's accounts were compromised in a very, very big way. It's kind of scary. I'm going to just double-check the latest news on this because frankly, it is just shocking.

But here's the bottom line, there are a number of high profile accounts and they're all accounts that have that little blue checkmark next to it. Right? You've seen that before on Twitter.

It turns out that Twitter was very unprepared to handle this hack and they ended up turning off all of these accounts. It is just absolutely amazing. Twitter stock, of course, took a nosedive and pre-market opening here on Thursday and it was kinda everybody.

[00:02:00] Well, we had Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates. The very top. President Trump was not hacked. I have my theories about why that was. Apple was hacked and many others. Now, at least one of Twitter's own employees appears to have been involved in this particular hack. What happened was apparently, right we'll find out more, the FBI is investigating. Apparently what happened is the there's a tool kind of a God mode tool. Do you remember that with Uber? Where Uber employees who were watching where you and I were going, but okay. They didn't care about us, but they want to know where Beyonce was going and all of these other stars and where were they coming from, and what were their home addresses? Some of them were selling that information. Okay. Not good news so that God-mode on Uber got misused.

Well, as it turns out here on the Twitter front, they have a similar function. Where you can go in and look at anybody's account.

[00:03:00] Now, I mentioned Beyonce because there is a picture that was posted on [00:03:00] Twitter and taken down and posted and taken to heaven and posted of Beyonce's account using this kind of God mode. That's my phrase here, God mode account software. It was showing everything about Beyonce. What she was doing, her account was verified. She had her own domain, et cetera, et cetera.

Well, late last year, the Department of Justice charged two Twitter employees with providing private information from Twitter to Saudi Arabian nationals, according to CNBC. What happened here with the hack in case you're not aware we'll back up a little bit here.

[00:04:00] But these accounts were taken over apparently and they were used to send a message. Now, the message they sent was kind of shocking. It was, "Hey, I'm giving back here or due to the COVID-19" or, "You know, Uncle Joe Biden, he's always given away money." So he said, "Hey, listen, if you over the next four hours if you send me on Twitter Bitcoin to this Bitcoin account number, I'll double it." "I will double it and I'll send the money back to you." "So now you get to have a thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin. Well, now you get $2,000 with a Bitcoin, and apparently there was one guy from Japan who sent $40,000 worth of Bitcoin to the account." Well, the bad guys. I count was apparently just opened up this week and the money was moved very quickly from that Twitter account to other accounts online, which makes a lot of sense, right. Shuffle that money around, make it harder to track. All of that money is now in their hands because one of the reasons bad guys use Bitcoin is that Bitcoin has no way to return the money, to scrape it back, let's put it that way. In other words, if I send money to a Bitcoin wallet, it is there it is gone. Goodbye. Good luck. There's no way for me to take that money back.

[00:05:00] So there's well over a hundred thousand dollars that I'm going to say it here, that some stupid people sent to people using Bitcoin on Twitter. You know what really, really, how could you do that? It just doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to me, but apparently it did.

[00:06:00] Now, Twitter is saying that there was no real coordination between the hackers. Twitter saying that this was social engineering. Now, this is something I cover pretty extensively in my hacker killer cybersecurity course. The whole concept of social engineering, these are the phishing emails, these are phone calls that you might get pretending that it's somebody from it or whatever it might be. Those are all social engineering attacks and those attacks can really cause just incredible amounts of problems for you and me and for very, very good reason as well. Right. Because if we cooperate, unknowingly by clicking on the link, You know, going to a website and then entering information.

Or in this case, we see a message from a blue checkmark Twitter account. The message says, send me money on Bitcoin. One of them said, Hey, I really want to promote Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin's the future. Which, of course, is what Bitcoin wants you to think. Right. They're going to be sitting there and saying, yeah, you're right. You're right. They're going to wait. We should be going all these fools with their bank accounts. They should be using Bitcoin. You are right. So it says, Bitcoin is a wave the future, and I really want to promote it. I really, I want to help you people who've been trying to promote it. So over there next, whatever it was, 30 minutes, four hours, if you send me Bitcoin, Oh, doubled it. I'm giving back. Elon Musk was one of the accounts that sent this out as well. So there's a little slight degree of, you know, okay. This could be true.

[00:07:00] But in reality, this goes back to what we've known for years. If it seems too good to be true, it's not true. Right? So maybe some of these Twitter employees were scammed using these phishing attacks. Maybe not. We've certainly seen it before with insiders.

We've seen Facebook employees, stocking people. Remember, it's not just employees nowadays, these tools that we're talking about, these God mode type tools. Are given to contractors from all of these major companies, Uber we mentioned already, but Facebook, we already know Facebook has people who are online using these tools to decide whether or not the censor President Trump, right.

[00:08:00] Or you or me. Or watching videos on YouTube and deciding whether or not that should be demonetized because, Oh my gosh, you said something that, you know, a 0.01% of the people might be upset about. And I'm one of that 0.01%. So I'm going to demonetize you, which means. In the real world terms, Hey, listen, if you are a conservative and do you have a YouTube channel and you say something, they don't like, you're not going to be able to make any money from that YouTube video.

We see that all the time from Prager University and many conservative speakers. So did 200 employees cooperate with the hackers, hard to say right now, Given that last fall, Saudi Arabia was able to get a couple of Twitter employees to kind of flip for them. Then the answer to that is kind of maybe.

[00:09:00]How long did it take to stop hackers? It took hours to stop them. Unfortunately, the last thing was posted, I think, Wednesday night at about 6:00 PM. So it took a while and Twitter attempted to slow this whole thing down.

They blocked verified accounts, which means if you had an, a verified account and there are a lot of them out there, a lot of us in the media, in the training realm and celebrities, we have blue checks, by our names. I don't, okay. But many people do.

So because of that, and because of the fact that a lot of these blue check accounts were being used for the scam, twitter said, okay, no more postings from blue check accounts. All right. So it took a while.

It was just a Bitcoin scam. It could have been a lot worse. And there are a lot of businesses out there that use Twitter in order to disseminate information in real-time. So all of those businesses, and that includes a lot of entertainment businesses really got nailed by this.

[00:10:00] I think when you start looking into this a little bit more deeply, We learn it something, there are a few things to learn, but one of the big things that we learned from this is you cannot count on using some of these platforms that are online, you can count on using some of them for your business and keeping your data safe.

Because again, and again, and again, you know, all the way back to 20 years ago, these even the earliest social media sites were plagued by people who were working there. Who were giving the information way? Okay.

President Trump's account was not hacked apparently, really. They were probably able to access private information. Cause you remember, they had this God mode, as I call it. Type tool that they were using. So that's kind of a very big deal. All right.

We only got about a half, half a minute left here, so let's talk about what's up next.

[00:11:00] We've got to talk about this, Microsoft. This is a very, very, very big deal. There's a patch out there right now. We'll tell you about that. We're going to talk also about Google. We've mentioned them before and tracking users and selling user's data. They're getting sued again because apparently. Google has not learned.

Hey, make sure you visit me online. Go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. I've almost got my news studio all done here. We're going to do a lot more pieces of training, a lot more live training, and we're probably going to start offering some of my courses again as well, but stick around because we'll be right back.

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