Bitcoin.org got hacked Wednesday night. Attackers posted a banner promising to ‘double’ any Bitcoin sent to them.
Bitcoin.org’s anonymous curator, Cobra, announced on Twitter that the website has been compromised and may be down for a few days. The crypto wallet listed on the scam message collected $17,700 in small transactions before the website went offline on Thursday morning.
The fake giveaway
The classic fake giveaway announcement scam replaced the entire site during the breach. Once you visited the site, you couldn’t skirt around a pop-up reading:
No affiliation exists between Bitcoin.org and the Bitcoin Foundation. The Bitcoin Foundation uses the web address bitcoinfoundation.org and is a nonprofit trade group that promotes digital currency adoption. Bitcoin.org is an open-source project registered in the early crypto days.
After the website was disabled, Cobra noted that the hackers exploited a flaw in the DNS but did not compromise the servers or Cloudflare accounts of Bitcoin.org.
A constant pain
Since around 2017, such scams have become a challenge for the crypto industry. Attackers manipulate unsuspecting visitors into giving away personal information or money.
The catch is that for you to take part in the so-called giveaway, you must send cryptocurrency to a specified address. Hackers prompt you to do this to ‘verify’ your wallet address so that you can receive the promised cash.
Some urgency or limitations to the number of people who can participate always feature in such scams. The scam message on Bitcoin.org pointed out that the giveaway was limited to the first 10,000 users. The aim was to convince you to send money quickly!
Once you send money, there’s no hope of getting it back because cryptocurrency transactions are irreversible.
Such scams are a constant pain and users are warned to always exercise caution. BBC states that scammers made $18 million from scams in the first 3.5 months of 2021 alone. That’s a significant increase compared to $16 million in 2020.
It happened before
The latest attack comes only months after Bitcoin.org fell victim to a DDoS attack in early July, along with a 0.5 bitcoin ransom demand. This was just after the site had faced a legal battle in the UK.
Cryptocurrency is being adopted fast all over the world. As regions, presidents, and even entire countries continue accepting crypto, something needs to be done to educate key players and deal with such security issues.
