Gate.io had its Twitter account compromised by a group of hackers promoting an online scam. But the attack did not last long.
Hackers are once again taking advantage of social networks to do their own thing. This time, they hacked the official Twitter account of a popular cryptocurrency exchange to promote an online scam.
Around midnight on October 21, PeckShieldAlert reported that the official Gate.io Twitter account had been hacked to promote a scam that simulated a Giveaway of up to 500,000 USDT in rewards.
The tweet posted by the hacker offered a prize of 500 USDT to the first 1,000 winners who claimed their rewards by connecting their wallets to a fake scam page, masquerading as the platform’s official page.
Thanks to warnings from Peckshield and the community, Gate.io regained control of its account and removed the malicious ads. However, the number of victims of the scam is still unknown.
The Rise of Phishing Attacks and Cryptocurrency Scams
The crypto gift advertising scam scam claimed the lives of many victims in 2020, when the accounts of several celebrities such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden was hacked, raising doubts about Twitter’s privacy policies and its ability to detect hackers. A young man who used the breach to get some free cryptocurrencies has been held responsible for the controversial hack.
Celebrities in the crypto world are no strangers to phishing attacks either. From Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin Cardano, founder Charles Hoskinson to Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, many big names have been used as bait for complex (and simple) crypto scams. . Recently, the CEO of Ripple complained that Twitter’s AI is still unable to distinguish between real accounts and scam accounts that are increasing exponentially on the platform.
According to the latest Interpol report on the matter, the vast majority of the 195 countries that are members of this organization expect this type of activity to increase further in the coming years, which is why they have set up a special unit to fight cybercrime on an international scale.
Another attack of the week: Olympus DAO
Phishing scams have been on the rise but so have white hat hackers who, over the past few months, have personally reported flaws in smart contract projects to reap the rewards offered.
For example, yesterday, a hacker stole nearly $300k in OHM tokens from OlympusDAO but decided to return them a few hours later.
A hacker can get up to $3.3 million if he reports a code bug. Since January 2022, the DAO has offered that amount as a reward to those who discover bugs that can cause the loss of millionaires’ money.
Read more: Spain overtakes El Salvador to become third largest crypto ATM hub
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