Last week, threat-makers took over Bitcoin.org the official site of the Bitcoin project and altered its content to promote a crypto giveaway scam that certain users fell for and this was disbursed through various Bitcoin news site.
While the hack lasted less than an hour, hackers appear to have taken home around $17,000.
Bitcoin.org Hacked to run a double your money scam
“The Bitcoin Foundation is giving back to the community! We want to support our users who have helped us along the years,” encouraging users to transfer bitcoins directly to an attacker’s wallet address.
“Send Bitcoin to this address, and we will send double the amount in return!”
In addition, to increase the attraction to the claim scammers claimed they were only available only to first 10,000 people who signed up.
The wallet address of the attacker that people were urged to transfer funds to the following address and further information and instruction is available on several Bitcoin news platform:
1NgoFwgsfZ19RrCUhTmmuLpmdek45nRd5N
Following this hacking incident Bitcoin.org’s website operator(s) who are known as Cobra also issued a warning to the public in regard to the incident:
http://Bitcoin.org has been compromised. Currently looking into how the hackers put up the scam modal on the site. May be down for a few days.
10:38 AM · Sep 23, 2021
While Bitcoin is believed to have been invented by a pseudonymous name, “Satoshi Nakamoto,” the creator of the research paper which led to the creation of Bitcoin press release distribution, a brand new persona “Cobra” is lately seen in charge of the Bitcoin.org website along with social media channels and communities channels.
The attackers stole more than $17,000 from scam
Following Cobra’s announcement Bitcoin.org’s name registrar Namecheap was also quick to block for a while until this issue had been fixed:
Unfortunately certain cryptocurrency enthusiasts could be a victim of the fraud as shown by the balance of the attacker’s wallet. The transaction history includes multiple transactions made by different Bitcoin address to wallet of the attacker.
The most recent balance update of the wallet was 0.40571238 BTC or approximately US$17,000.
Bitcoin.org has been restored. Bitcoin press release distribution service ,However, the root source of the hijack is not known, though certain people have speculated that it might possibly be the result of a DNS hijack 2, 2[ 1, 2].
Giveaway scams are commonplace in the world of cryptocurrency since attackers who have set up such scams have seen a lot of success. A few days ago, BleepingComputer reported on the ” Elon Musk Mutual Aid” that was circulated through email.
It’s easy to ignore these scams, thinking nobody would be sucked in by these, however, similar scams involving crypto have proven extremely successful and have generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past.
For instance, scammers made $180K in one day in the year 2018. Twitter had to endure a huge attack in which cryptocurrency scammers earned $580K over the course of a week, January 2021. Then another scam raked in an additional $145K on February ,Bitcoin press release distribution .
Not too long in the past, someone sent three bitcoin (or $150,074) in the moment, to a well-known scam involving crypto giveaways.
Users must be vigilant about scams using cryptocurrency and email scams.
