On 23rd September 2021, the alleged operator and owner of Bitcoin.org made a public announcement that the website has been taken over by hackers. After taking over the website the hackers launched a phony Bitcoin scheme and claimed that the website will be restored with all its features and contents in a few days’ time.
It wouldn’t be wrong to assume that crypto scammers, fraudsters, hackers, and ransomware attackers are on the loose these days. For the past many days, there hasn’t been a single day where either of such occurrences has not taken place. In the US alone there have been two ransomware attacks recently. In South Africa, the department of justice was attacked by ransomware actors. Now there has been a hack attack and the present attack has occurred to Bitcoin.org.
The compromised website is owned by an entity called “Cobra”. It has been notified by Cobra that the website of Bitcoin.org was attacked and compromised. Cobra, who presumably a person, tweeted that he himself is investigating the incident of hack attack. He said that he is trying to find out how the hackers managed to breach the system. The owner of the website also noted that the hacker managed to launch a phony crypto scheme. The hacker has initiated a “doubler scam” on the website after gaining full control of the website.
Doubler scam is a kind of crypto scam in which the scammer tries to entice the audience by offering high-rise profits. Furthermore, the public is fooled by scammers who offer them a chance to purchase a small portion of Bitcoins. If the enticed person deposits the money for the purchase, then the money is gone and in fact, stolen. To date, no person is able to get their promised double reward. In fact, they realize afterward that the offer was not genuine but a trick to defraud them.
According to Cobra, there were few deposits made by certain people against the phony Bitcoin offer. As informed by Cobra, the amount of deposit was approximately US$ 17,000. This information was revealed by Cobra in a tweet post as well as posted on Bitcoin.org’s main page. Meanwhile, some of Bitcoin.org’s users have been claiming that the loss could be higher than one can imagine. However, Bitcoin.org is saying that the loss is about US$ 17,000.
It was further notified that a few 3-figured rewards were offered to a few of the website’s visitors. Obviously, these funds have been given for making people believe that the fraud scheme is “genuine”. One of the visitors of Bitcoin.org claimed that it is quite possible that the attackers are owners of crypto as well.
So far Cobra has been able to identify that the scam was of “DNS Hijack” type. The website currency is in a state where there is only limited content shown on the website. In this regard, a public warning has been officially issued by Cobra asking people to beware of what lies ahead currently.