Security News > 2020 > November > No, the creator of cURL didn't morph into Elon Musk and give away Bitcoins. But his hijacked Twitter page tried to

The creator of cURL reassured The Reg on Tuesday that he's not a billionaire rocket man giving away Bitcoins, no matter what his Twitter account claimed.

Daniel Stenberg, who maintains the widely used Swiss army-knife of network data transfer tools, had his verified Twitter account hijacked by person or persons unknown, its name and avatar was changed to that of Elon Musk's, and it was used to peddle a Bitcoin scam.

Speaking to El Reg shortly before he finally managed to convince Twitter to give him back control of his profile, Stenberg said he was "Pretty confident" that none of his cURL work has been compromised or had malicious code sneaked into it.

Writing on his website, Stenberg said someone seized control of his Twitter account, which has 24,000 followers, while he was busy debugging cURL code - that person rapidly switched the account's registered email address and password to lock him out before turning it into a Bitcoin scam.

A group of Dutch hackers who said they guessed US president Donald Trump's Twitter password earlier this year reckoned that the site enforces geo-based controls as a form of authentication, having found and bypassed that feature themselves on Trump's account by using a VPN. For now, don't transfer Bitcoins to strangers on Twitter.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/11/18/curlr_bitcoin_hack/