TL;DR Breakdown
- Hackers hit Satoshi Nakamoto website to run giveaway scam.
- Website taken down after hack.
- Crypto community prone to giveaway scams.
Anonymous crypto hackers have laid siege to the website of Satoshi Nakamoto (Bitcoin.org). The website is the first and oldest website relating to Bitcoin.
Earlier on Thursday, 23rd September, the website was compromised by unknown hackers to promote dubious Bitcoin giveaways. Unfortunately, the scammers had gotten around $17,764 before the breach was discovered, and the site was subsequently taken down.
Hours after the Satoshi Nakamoto website breach, users noticed the fraud and shared it on Twitter. The website’s homepage displayed a pop-up page that asks users to send Bitcoin to a dedicated address with promises they will receive doubled amount in return.
Needless to say, this was indeed another scam, which the community has already grown accustomed to. The crypto community has experienced countless fraudulent activities involving some of the most well-known names in and outside the space.
Satoshi Nakamoto website taken down after hack
After the site was compromised, all other sub-pages on it stopped functioning. The homepage would not allow clicking into any other pages or checks on the PDF version of the BTC white paper.
Checks by Cryptopolitan also confirms an error message (ERR_SSL_VERSION) displayed as we attempted to visit the page.
The website, managed by an anonymous account named Cobra announced on Twitter that the website might remain offline for a couple of days after the hack. Cobra also blamed the security breach on the recent change to Cloudflare for web hosting and believed there was some sort of lapse from the web infrastructure provider.
Crypto and unending giveaway scams
Giveaway scams are one of the most popular ways crypto scammers operate. It is only unfortunate a structure so important, and even the origin of the space happens to be exploited by these hackers.
Last year, Twitter handles of top celebrities, influencers, and politicians were hacked to run a similar Bitcoin giveaway. The hackers then carted hundreds of thousands of dollars within a few minutes that the tweets were up for. However, the perpetrators of that heist have been arrested and are currently in jail.
