No sooner than the hacking of Target’s Twitter account was announced by TheNextWeb, the media website had another scam to cover – Google. Just like Target, Google became the latest verified account to be hacked by attackers on Twitter, promoting a “Bitcoin giveaway” scam that they hoped would reach the 800,000 followers.

The message on Twitter read,

First time I've seen this scam – it's a promoted tweet, but If you click the user ID in the tweet, it actually takes you to the legit G Suite Twitter account. Very clever. @Google @gsuite pic.twitter.com/Us7ygYZMi6

— Andrew Maxey (@andrewmaxey) November 13, 2018

The post ends with a link to participate in the giveaway, which is undoubtedly the way that the scammers lift the crypto wallet information from Twitter followers.

Unfortunately, TNW was unable to determine how long the tweet remained on the account before being discovered and deleted. However, based on the screenshots that they provided, Gsuite had the post active for at least 11 minutes. Though they have reached out to Google, there hasn’t been a response, considering the amount of time since the hack. However, the interesting part of the post is that Google had just spoken with TheNextWeb moments before, discussing their methods of reducing cryptocurrency hacks on their own platform.

At some point, the attention has to turn to Twitter for having a platform that seems to be easily hacked. The post regarding Google came only 16 minutes after TNW Hard Fork published an article about Twitter’s role in the whole process. According to a spokesperson, Twitter is presently establishing protocols that would prevent these kinds of Bitcoin scams from posting to Twitter.

In a statement to TheNextWeb directly, Twitter said that they had found many crypto-related breeches. However, they also said,

“We’ve been in close contact with Target this morning and can also confirm that their account was inappropriately accessed for approximately half an hour, after which we swiftly locked the account, so Twitter could thoroughly investigate the issue.”

Going forward, Twitter plans to work closely with similar companies to prevent the issues, though there was no direct answer as to what work they plan to do.

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