90′ investigations. When you think about it anyway, what a mistake on the part of the Securities and Exchange Commission! While hundreds of thousands of people had their eyes glued to their But since last week and this tragicomic incident, everyone is still wondering who could have done such a thing and Gary Gensler’s teams felt obliged to publish a press release to try to give the beginning of an explanation. . Here is the official version of the longest 90 minutes of Gary Gensler’s career.
SEC declares security incident and hack of their X account
The SEC press release covers hour by hour the moments leading up to and following the release of the message and the story begins to 4 p.m.east coast time, Tuesday January 9, 2024, while it is 10 p.m. in Paris. At this moment, “an unauthorized party” takes control of the telephone number associated with the SEC account and therefore control of the account itself.
HAS 4:11 p.m.the individual(s) published the famous message of the approval of Bitcoin ETFs and two minutes later, they posted the following, shorter message: “$Bitcoin”. Shortly after, this second message was deleted by “the unauthorized part” but not the first. In the process, the individual(s) will like – like – two publications on X.
HAS 4:26 p.m.staff in the agency’s Office of Public Affairs issues a message via Gary Gensler’s X account to alert the public that his account and no, spot Bitcoin ETFs are not approved. Immediately afterwards, the technical services of the SEC withdrew the two likes as well as the publication in question.
HAS 4:42 p.m.new message, but this time on the official account of the institution, to repeat that the account was hacked and to recall the situation regarding ETFs. X personnel are immediately called upon to secure the account and put an end to this “unauthorized access”.
An unauthorized message that still stands out for a government agency!
The incident will end between 4:40 p.m. And 5:30 p.m.time at which the SEC claims to have regained control of his account “There is currently no evidence that the unauthorized party had access to the SEC’s systems, data, devices or other social media accounts. »
On January 12, the president of the SEC subsequently spoke in a statement to the tune of Post Mortem and declared:
“Commission staff is still assessing the impacts of this incident on the agency, investors, and the market, but recognize that these impacts include concerns regarding the security of the SEC’s social media accounts. »
Gary Gensler – Source: SEC
Before declaring without blinking that “the SEC takes its cybersecurity obligations seriously” and that the time has now come to assess the impacts of this incident “on the agency, investors and the market”. But it’s not just the Commission that wants answers about this incident! The Senate would also like to know what happened and what the consequences of this malicious act could be.
Finally, for completeness, know that many federal services are on deck to find the authors since they are the Office of Inspector General of the SEC, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of the Department of Homeland Security who are simultaneously responsible for clarifying this matter. Bad day for Gary Gensler who had to, the next day, approve the Bitcoin ETFs via this same X account!