Scammers Evolved, More Dangerous Than Ever
News appeared lately with popular cryptocurrency Youtubers having their channels compromised by hackers.
This event alone may not mean much because it is common with the lack of security at Youtube. Although, the fact that these were some of the most popular crypto accounts at Youtube is important, since some of them have relation with programming and should understand the dangers.
Now, this was not a SIM Swap attack as some suggested, it just means these people didn't do their homework and don't understand this was not one account hacked, so the hackers simply couldn't have gained access to the SIM card of each of the owner of these channels at the same time.
It was a hack, but not one we have seen in Youtube yet, but we have seen a similar one with Twitter in 2020, when a team of scammers used social engineering to gain admin access.
Some of the youtuber accounts hacked three days ago were:
Ivan On Tech
Box Mining
Andrea Antonopoulos
Bitboy Crypto
Altcoin Buzz
But the hack did not just stop in the popular figureheads that talk about crypto. More channels even from companies were targeted.
Coinmarketcap
Wazirx Exchange
CoinDCX
CoinSwitch
Unocoin
Crypto.com
All of the channels at youtube after they got hijacked they started playing a video uploaded by the hackers that was seven minutes long and discussing a scam coin called One World Cryptocurrency.
It also seems the hackers did not change usernames or passwords, and the owners were able to delete the video's themselves.
But all of the YouTubers are experienced enough to know about the hacks that usually going on and protect their accounts with 2FA. Also they understand the dangers and the previous approach with phising emails.
This hack was not on the user side, unless there is a new method the hackers use that is not known to us yet. The blame falls directly at YouTube, since this looks like it was some kind of social engineering or inside job that allowed access to these account.
Perhaps some backdoor recently discovered by hackers that gave them access to these accounts but due to failsafes they couldn't completely control and isolate the owners from accessing their accounts.
Difficult to tell, but important to keep reading and discovering how hackers can create problems
The lure of easy prey attracts scammers in crypto since there will always be new people that haven't read about this danger and will fall victim to scams.
We can help our friends that ask for advice and while we talk about Bitcoin Cash, also explain the danger of not doing research but believing everything they see immediately.
We don't want scammers to win, make it known to your friends to judge better where they send their money and if they don't know, they can ask those that do, they will tell them which are the scams.
