Twitter accounts of both crypto exchange Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao were hacked by an anonymous user, drawing attention to the security issues involved and how easy it would have been to implement a phishing scheme.
The social media accounts of at least six crypto exchanges and media outlets were also temporarily taken over by the same group of hackers on Wednesday afternoon. Outside the crypto domain, Bill Gates and Elon Musk had their Twitter accounts hijacked as well.
Except for , the high-profile accounts have now been restored and fraudulent tweets were quickly deleted.
The hacker is seemingly trying to benefit from the successful attempt to gain control of the official handles to con Binance users, particularly with a cryptocurrency giveaway scam to an entity called CryptoForHealth.
We have partnered with CryptoForHealth and are giving back 5000 BTC.
See for more :
— CZ Binance (@cz_binance)
Binance’s CEO warned Twitter users of the scam within a few minutes of the hack, but his warning was hidden and blocked by the hackers, and then his handle itself was hacked.
The incident is significant as Binance Jersey’s Twitter account had been hacked a few months ago by a white hat hacker. Binance, which leads the world in terms of trading volume, has also suffered form a scandal that saw a hacker .
While the hack appears to be spotted by Binance users, which may limit the scam fallout, the entire cryptocurrency community is on high alert as there were rumors that cryptocurrency exchange Kucoin, as wells as industry news outlet CoinDesk, have lost control of their Twitter handles.
The same hackers were also behind taking over the twitter accounts of crypto platforms Bitfinex, Gemini and Coinbase, as well as Tron CEO Justin Sun and Bitcoin.com, as their handles published the same message of “giving back 5000 BTC to the community”.
It seems like some Twitter API posting service has been compromised and being used to send out fake “giveaway” tweets from popular crypto/blockchain accounts. “CryptoForHealth” is a scam.
No way are all these accounts unprotected by strong passwords and TOTP 2FA
— Andreas ☮ 🌈 ⚛ ⚖ 🌐 📡 📖 📹 🔑 🛩 (@aantonop)
Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Twitter account posted the following message to his followers.
The same blockchain address also appeared in a similar tweet posted on Bill Gates’ Twitter account. The scam yielded thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoins so far as some followers sent donations to the BTC address as a tracking of the blockchain network shows.
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