A major Indian Crypto Exchange's Twitter Account was Briefly Hacked
A major Indian Crypto Exchange's Twitter Account was Briefly Hacked
Hackers changed the meta data to make it look like Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple's CEO's twitter account.
Sorry for the early delivery dear readers but this happens to be my chance to report something before the mainstream catches a whiff of it.
After yesterday’s heartbreaking story, I wanted to write something really short and consumable so you can get back to work quickly and the story just fell on my lap. (Sorry Auro, I was working on this before you reported)
The news is exclusive, so far none of the mainstream media has noticed or talked about it. No one on Twitter is talking right now and possibly won’t even talk about it as the hack has been remedied.
CoinDCX, an India-based Crypto Exchange has over 230k followers on Twitter. However, this morning, their account was briefly taken over by hackers who have changed the display pic, name and description to that of Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse.
I sent messages to everyone I know at CoinDCX to inform them before I began to write the story. Whether they acted on the messages or not, I won’t know, but fortunately, the hack did zero damage as the account was restored within minutes.
The hackers were promoting the usual “giveaway scam”, asking readers to click on suspicious links. Having a verified check mark plus replacing CoinDCX with a known face and name gives a little sense of truth to a novice or unsuspecting user.
The account has also been retweeting the actual Garlinghouse’s tweets to secure further legitimacy.
Users are smarter than before and can spot such scams/spams on the bird website. This understanding combined with swift action from CoinDCX or the twitter team or both together quickly mitigated the risk took back control of the account from hackers and returned it slowly to the original state.
No damage was done.
There are over 20 different accounts that you can find on Twitter with the name Brad Garlinghouse. One can assume that they were either hacked or created as bots, to run the aforementioned scam.
Another verified Twitter handle @mohamedmtro, originally an Egyptian metro station’s twitter account, was taken over by hackers today to promote the same scam.
Alright. Now people are waking up to find out about the hack of these accounts. So I better publish this quick and get some brownie points for exclusive reporting.
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