On the 3rd of January 2021, things took a turn for the ironic for the cybersecurity company, Mandiant when one of their X accounts was sinisterly hijacked. Coming from an unknown entity, the hijacked account spread links purporting to hold large rewards in cryptocurrency in order to bait individuals into giving away passwords and logins. To the team’s dismay it seemed like the post continually re-appeared as the social media site fought an apparent tug-of-war. Google quickly acted upon learning of the incident and acquired the company a year later, in 2022, for a sum of 5.4 billion USD. Noting the inability to add blue or gold checkmarks to the account as doable with some other Google bases on the X platform, there have been discussions as to whether opting for a subscription payment for such accounts might prevent or speed up recovery from events such as this.
The spokesperson from 202Mandiant gave a statement, telling TechRadar Pro:
We are aware of the incident impacting the Mandiant X account. We’ve since regained control over the account and are currently working on restoring it.
The misunderstanding highlighted how Mandiant, who are renowned for helping its client investigate and recover from network breaches, fell victim to ironic occurrence such as this, something which could damage their reputation in theory.Humorous yet perturbing remarks from “Phantom”, the crypto and NTF Wallet provider, were also featured in the realm of posts from the start, with example posts such as memes sayingLuckily, Mandiant have they and announced they regained control of the account in order to lock the scammers out.
