Negative marketing | Twitter attack incident, Ethereum founder: Glad that hackers are targeting Bitcoin

While presented in a negative light, Bitcoin once again captures the world's attention. In the early hours of the 16th, Twitter was shocked by a large-scale hack where numerous high-profile accounts posted scam tweets such as "Send me a certain amount of Bitcoin, and I will return double in 30 minutes." However, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin saw the hackers targeting Bitcoin as a positive and offered his unique perspective.

As this massive Twitter attack involved many sensitive accounts, including former U.S. President Obama, presidential candidate Biden, politicians, business leaders, and prominent corporate accounts, all were invaded by hackers to post fraudulent messages. This prompted the involvement of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the investigation, with New York Attorney General Letitia James stating:

Countless Americans rely on Twitter to receive news, understand the thoughts of political figures, entrepreneurs, and opinion leaders. The attack on Twitter has raised serious concerns among the public, and the office has been instructed to immediately investigate the matter.

Vitalik: Glad it was Bitcoin

On the day of the incident, hackers took over various Twitter accounts for as long as two hours, but Vitalik Buterin was lucky not to be among the targets the hackers aimed at.

After the incident, Vitalik commented on the hacking event, first sarcastically stating that loopholes in centralized mechanisms like this are fantastic and have greatly helped maintain social harmony. He pointed out in a tweet:

These hackers could have caused more serious harm. I am actually glad that the hackers, driven by the interests of Bitcoin, used Bitcoin as a medium, instead of attempting to disclose personal information, manipulate stock prices, manipulate elections, or even start wars.

Larry Cermak: These hackers are idiots

The Block's Director of Research, Larry, also delved into the attack event, believing that Twitter's response to the attack was too slow. It was almost two hours after the hackers took over the accounts before Twitter began to take action. Over the course of two days, Larry's assessment of the hackers went from "unfathomable" to "they are idiots."

Larry, like Vitalik, believes that the damage caused by simply scamming Bitcoin is minimal. However, this is also the aspect that he cannot fathom. He stated on Twitter:

What's terrifying is not knowing the hackers' motives. Nothing crazy happened, and I highly doubt anyone would go through all this just to scam a few bitcoins. The value of the loophole (Twitter) itself may be several times those bitcoins.

However, around 3 AM Taiwan time today, Larry completely overturned his previous opinion. He stated:

Yesterday, I thought those hackers were geniuses, their motives were sinister, not just to scam a few bitcoins. But today I can confirm that these people are actually idiots, their wallet management is too careless, they don't really know how to use Bitcoin mixers, and they even withdraw from exchanges. If the FBI has already tracked them down, I'm not surprised, they are too careless.

Larry once again mentioned Coinbase's blockchain analysis software "Coinbase Analytics" sold to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), believing that through on-chain analysis and KYC data provided by exchanges, these hackers will soon be in trouble.

According to data, Coinbase officially granted the IRS the use of Coinbase Analytics on the 14th, signing a one-year contract for $124,950.

The severely affected Twitter plans to launch a new version of its developer API, announcing a complete rebuild of its Twitter API v2 from scratch.