The biggest news on Wednesday was the Twitter hack that saw the accounts of finance firms and major public figures, from Barack Obama and Joe Biden to Elon Musk and Kim Kardashian, tweeting out links for a blatant cryptocurrency scam.
"Now, if you're not familiar, a Bitcoin scam is anything involving Bitcoin," joked Stephen Colbert the next evening, also saving a bit of that snark for the Bad Blue Bird Website itself.
"Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey took to, well, Twitter to express his discontent, saying 'We all feel terrible this happened,'" the Late Show host said. "Fun fact: 'We all feel terrible this happened' is Twitter's official motto."
Of course, the real worry is not how many people actually fell for the suggestion that Kanye or Jeff Bezos wanted to give away free sort-of money — it's the fact that, especially in an election year, a platform that the President treats as a megaphone for policy and personal vendettas alike, and that millions rely on for real-time news, can be that vulnerable to compromise. While it's a plus that all the hackers wanted this time was to scam the gullible out of a bit of crypto cash, as Colbert pointed out, that's not at all reassuring.
"You don't just hack an election without doing a test drive," Colbert observed. "It's like the Fast and Furious movies. You don't lead with fleeing a submarine across a Siberian ice floe. That's crazy. You've got to start small, just with cars. You work your way up to a Tokyo Drift. Then you have The Rock redirect a torpedo with his bare hands. Otherwise, it just seems far-fetched."
