How the tables have turned….
Bitcoin.org, the website for the biggest cryptocurrency and operated by pseudonymous bitcoin developers Satoshi Nakamoto and others, was recently hacked which led visitors to a giveaway scam. The website which ironically has a whole page dedicated to teaching users how to not get scammed fell prey to the heinous acts of the hackers when it couldn’t protect itself against a third-party pop-up that blocked the original website.
This isn’t the first time that the security of Bitcoin.org was compromised. In July, the website was hit with a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack with hackers making a ransom demand for an undisclosed amount of Bitcoin, reported by CoinTelegraph. And this week, it fell a victim to hacking yet again. “Looks like Bitcoin.org got hacked and the entire site replaced with a scam asking for free Bitcoin,” Bitcoin developer Matt Corallo wrote in a tweet. The website went offline for some time as the real developers tried to regain access but it seems like the hackers got away with at least $17000, according to Crypto Briefing.
The hackers got access to the website on Wednesday evening and displayed a pop-up message which blocked the entire homepage of the original website. “The Bitcoin Foundation is giving back to the community!” the scammers wrote in the pop-up. “We want to support our users who have helped us along the years [sic].”
This isn’t the first time that hackers have made use of giveaway scams which seem to be getting common as days go by. There have been hundreds of Elon Musk-themed crypto scams recently in which hackers invite users to send money to a Bitcoin wallet by claiming to double their investment and of course, never give it back (that’s how scams work). We feel sorry for the guy who lost half a million dollars after falling victim to one of these scams but this is exactly why you shouldn’t trust anything on the internet. If it seems too good to be true, it usually is…