Bitcoin.org hackers peddled BTC giveaway scam similar to Twitter heist
Bitcoin.org was hacked again early Thursday morning. Visitors to the well-known Bitcoin portal found a giveaway scam instead of the white paper and other crypto-related educational materials.
A pop-up promised the first 1,000 users to transfer Bitcoin to a nefarious wallet would receive double in return.
- The pop-up blocked all other activity on the website.
- The wallet address received 0.4 BTC ($17,700) in an hour (according to The Block).
- Bitcoin.org was taken offline for a short time, but the site has since been restored.
The website’s pseudonymous domain owner tweeted to confirm Bitcoin.org had suffered a hack. They added the site may be down for a few days.
Cøbra has dealt with their fair share of headaches because of their online education resource. Thursday’s hack is just the latest.
Bitcoin.org suffered a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) cyberattack earlier this year. The perps demanded a 0.5 BTC ($22,300) ransom to restore the service.
This came just days after the London High Court ordered Cøbra to cough up $50,000 in legal costs.
Australian businessman Craig Wright had won a default judgement when Cøbra didn’t respond to a copyright claim against the Bitcoin white paper.
Wright purports to be Bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto. However, he’s yet to offer any proof.
Curiously, Cøbra earlier this month revealed someone else professing to be Nakamoto has decided to battle Wright. The other Satoshi applied for a court hearing to undo the judgement.
Bitcoin.org hack used similar tactics to Motherload scam
It’s not clear yet who’s responsible for Thursday’s hijacking of Bitcoin.org.
Although, the hacker’s pop-up featured similar language to a Bitcoin scam that plagued Twitter in July 2020.
“The Bitcoin Foundation is giving back to the community,” the Bitcoin.org pop-up read. This is similar to the tweets from accounts purporting to be celebrities and influencers — which lured followers into handing over Bitcoin.
After a successful social engineering campaign, a crew of young hackers broke into Twitter’s back-end systems and commandeer verified accounts like Jeff Bezos’ and Barack Obama’s.
[Read more: Elon Musk isn’t giving away Bitcoin! ‘Motherload’ scam earned $2M last week]
Florida teen, Graham Ivan Clarke (18), received a three-year stint in a juvenile detention centre for his involvement in the exploit.
Three more members of the crew were detained by authorities. The most recent, Joseph O’Conner (22) was picked up in Estepona, Spain in July by local police on behalf of the US Department of Justice.
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