Twitter’s bitcoin scam compels New York regulator to call for action

The financial regulating body, New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) said that the “double your money with bitcoin” scam as a result of the infamous Twitter hack on July 15 led to “weaponization” of major social media companies. The policymakers have called for strong cybersecurity to curb such events. 

NYDFS claimed that in other industries, cybersecurity was deemed “critical,” and that it planned to bolster regulations for social media companies, such as Twitter, which has over 330 million total monthly active users. According to the researchers, this BTC scam is said to have brought Twitter “to its knees” and demonstrated Twitter’s weak security infrastructure. 

The regulators stated that: 

The Twitter hack demonstrates, more than anything, the risk to society when systemically important institutions are left to regulate themselves.

In monetary value, the Hackers stole over $118,000 worth of bitcoin. But more significantly, this incident exposed the vulnerability of a global social media platform 

Since the BTC scam and hack was allegedly operated by a teenager, policymakers were concerned that anybody could use “basic techniques” to exploit Twitter’s security measures: 

It was surprising how easily the Hackers were able to penetrate Twitter’s network and gain access to internal tools allowing them to take over any Twitter user’s account. 

The report concluded that social media companies had “evolved into an indispensable means of communications” and that this evolution now called for a “regulatory regime.”