Why do people blame Bitcoin or Victims of Twitter hack?

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(Edited)

Bitcoin got a hell lot of publicity today. Was it a positive one or negative one is the question.

Jokes apart, today we witnessed one of the biggest hack of a social media platform in recent history. This once again showcased to the world how vulnerable are centralized systems. All centralized systems have a centralized point of failure which can be compromised at some point of time.


A redacted screenshot of Twitter's Adminstrative Panel that was used to execute this scam

There is a long list of Twitter accounts that were compromised including major crypto exchanges, their CEOs, Politicians, Media, Tech enterpreneurs, celebrities etc. Most of these accounts had over a million followers.

Twitter figured out the problem:

We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020

But you can never eliminate the risk of social engineering attack completely.

With their double-your-bitcoin in 30 minute offer posted from several trusted accounts, scammer were successful in pocketing about $125000 from over 300 people.

During the hack, I came across several Tweets that were shaming the victims for falling to a scammer and for not taking adequate precautions. Everyone was blaming victims but no one was blaming Twitter for it.

Why?

Because they felt they were smarter as they didn't fall into the scamer's trap so they felt privileged to give some educational lessons to the victims.

The point is, not everyone is as smart as you. Not everyone is in the same life situation or mental state as you. Some people may be under tremendous financial pressure and are looking for any quick money scheme as a god sent help and a boon.

What will they evaluate when the people, whom they trust and look up to, whom they are followng on Twitter for years and whom they trust more than themselves suddenly post a giveaway tweet? Moreover, scammer created a time pressure to act within 30 minutes. So people don't get much time to think for acting upon that deal.

There is a time in everyone's life when your smartness is over-powered by greed or urgent necesities of your life that require immediate money. However there is only a small minority of such people at any given time.

Did you notice the fact that scam message was distributed to millions of people. Still, only about 300-350 could be scammed. IMO, it was far less than what I was expecting. It could easily have been much more than that!

There was no way to know if a verified Twitter account is not what it is (in the moment of scam tweet). This was completely fault of the Twitter and not the victim.

You just can't blame the victim and get away!

On the other hand, some Indian media is using this news to portray Bicoin as a scam. Now this is not even factual.

But why Bitcoin is being pointed as a scam?

Well, most of the media has reported this incident with two words "Bitcoin scam" in their headline. In fact, the whole event has been named as 2020 Twitter Bitcoin Scam. So in short, it is being referred as Bitcoin scam.

In fact, media reports are stating it as "Twitter acounts hacked in Bitcoin scam".

Some like NDTV have gone a step further and are saying it as Crypto scam. So whole industry of cryptocurrencies can be portrayed as scam. That's what Indian government's narrative is!

In summary, in this unfortunate incident, I've seen and heard criticism of scammed victims, criticism of Bitcoin & cryptocurrency but haven't came across similar criticism of Twitter in comparison. In fact, Twitter should bear the major chunk of blame for this.

Market responded with only 4% drop in Twitter's stock prices. Does that mean vulnerability of Twitter is acceptable to the market and its users?



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16 comments
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Because crypto is an excellent scape goat for all things people don't understand about the internet!

Posted Using LeoFinance

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True that. So whatever they don't understand is a scam.
What a ridiculous way to define the word "scam" :)

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Twitter gets hacked, Bitcoin goes down.

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Bitcoin should get free publicity from this and Twitter should go down. But it seems, this world is upside down 🙃

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The media will always put their version of the story out there a version they want people to believe, sadly only few like us know who to blame in this incident. I do believe Bitcoin got some publicity of good and bad.

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Unfortunately, media is a strong tool to brainwash general public into anything they want to force upon! But ultimately truth will survive as it is invincible.

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It always takes time but truth does have a way of revealing in the end

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The hackers had the power to manipulate the stock market by tweeting, but they only asked for bitcoin.

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Yes, they could have done a lot of damage but they chose Bitcoin oveer all others. This says something about crypto 🤓

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They are using any negative publicity they can get to try and make people scared of it or dislike it. Funny enough, these types of things happen every single day with American dollars and other fiat currencies but it's not as big of news as this is. Just trying to keep people from doing things that would liberate them!

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So true. They wanna play according to their own narrative.

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Seems as "crypto scam" sells better than "Twitter got hacked". Media is the real scam and alongside the fiat money, that is used in centuries to scam people.

But, yes, you can't blame a low (don't get me wrong) educated person to fall for a trick. Even if one should know that "give me to give back double" isn't working, you can't deny that if Bill Gates or Musk says this, it has a heavily impact..

Lastly, I think that hackers had the same thought with you "several millions and only 300 individuals were scammed" so at the end wasn't that successful..

Twitter got hacked, not Bitcoin!

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You so rightly pointed how media and fiat are the biggest scam. The word "scam" attract more attention than the word "hack". But the media didn't had guts to call Twitter a scam, (as it's also a media).

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