Bitcoin exchange service Coinbase said it blocked bitcoin amounting to almost $280,000 from being transferred to the attackers behind the massive hack that took over Twitter last week, according to a Forbes report.
Last Wednesday hackers compromised 130 high-profile Twitter accounts, including that of former President Barack Obama, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Kanye West. Hijackers used the accounts to advertise a scam asking customers to donate bitcoin to phony cryptocurrency addresses. They ultimately got away with $121,000 from unsuspecting victims.
According to Forbes, Coinbase and other cryptocurrency exchanges were able to stop some customers from sending bitcoin to the hackers by blacklisting the hackers’ wallet address. Specifically, Coinbase says it prevented just over 1,000 customers from sending around $280,000 worth of bitcoin during last Wednesday’s attack. Roughly 14 Coinbase users sent around $3,000 worth of bitcoin to the scam’s bitcoin address before the company moved to blacklist it, the company said.
Twitter accounts belonging to cryptocurrency exchanges including Binance and Gemini were also targeted during Wednesday’s attack. Coinbase’s chief information officer told Forbes on Sunday that it learned of the scam shortly after tweets were posted from fellow exchanges’ accounts.
Twitter is still investigating Wednesday’s attack. On Friday, the company put out a blog post confirming that 130 accounts were targeted and the hackers were able to initiative a password reset, log in to the account, and send tweets for 45 of those accounts. Twitter also said that the hackers were able to download account data belonging to eight unverified users.
