Crypto YouTuber accounts survive hack attempt
Hackers have recently attacked a series of the most popular crypto YouTuber accounts around the afternoon of January 23. The accounts have reportedly posted unauthorized videos having text that directs viewers to send money to the hacker’s wallets.
Accounts that have appeared being targeted by the attack include ‘BitBoy Crypto’, ‘Box Mining’, ‘Altcoin Buzz’, ‘Ivan on Tech’, ‘Floyd Mayweather’, and ‘The Moon’, among several others.
A Binance Smart Chain wallet address that had been listed on the fraudulent videos received a total of 9 transactions in BNB while writing this report, with a total value estimated at $850.
Michael Gu has spoken to the media regarding his YouTube channel Boxmining that, which had posted a video without his permission. He said that luckily they had caught it within two mins of the video going live and they managed deleting it, but by that time, there were already views and comments from his community.
Gu added that he had done an internal sweep but found no viruses or bugs that would have given the hackers access to his account.
One Reddit post made by user “9Oh8m8” has suggested that it appears as if the hackers had been able to gain access to the crypto accounts using a SIM swap scam that had possibly enabled them to bypass two-factor authentication (2FA).
The user further added that the hackers are mostly posting with a title like “ONE WORLD CRYPTOCURRENCY”, which means they might have an address in vid and description to send USDT/USDC/BNB/ETH for receiving a new crypto called OWCY.”
Gu, however, wasn’t convinced that the hack resulted from a SIM swap. He said that there were no logins on his own private Google account, and had it been a SIM swap, he would have lost access to his phone etc., but that didn’t happen.
Founder and CEO of the YouTube channel of Altcoin Buzz, Shash Gupta, has added that they did notice something going amiss at around 1 AM Singapore time as an unauthorized video had been posted to their channel, but they are unclear of what happened. Gupta said he was talking to Youtube to understand the matter and avoid such further breaches.
YouTuber Richard Heart had tweeted at 9:30 PM UTC that his channel was banned during the middle of a live stream, suggesting that YouTube had probably been aware of the event.
Cointelegraph had reached out to YouTube and several other crypto content creators who had been affected by the hack, but they had not received any additional information at the time of writing this news.
