Attackers seized Bitcoin [.] Org website and stole $ 17,000 from visitors

The cybercriminals temporarily seized the official website of the Bitcoin project (Bitcoin [.] Org) and inserted an advertisement for the fraudulent distribution of cryptocurrency on the resource pages. Although the hack lasted less than a day ago, some users managed to believe the hackers, and the scammers “earned” about $ 17,000.

Bleeping Computer writes that on September 23, the following message appeared on the site’s home page:

In the message, users were asked to credit funds to the address 1NgoFwgsfZ19RrCUhTmmuLpmdek45nRd5N belonging to the attackers.

Shortly after the site was hacked, Bitcoin [.] Org, known as Cøbra, reported on Twitter that the site had been compromised.

Following this message, Cøbra also responded to the problem with the Namecheap domain registrar, quickly disabling the domain until the problem was resolved.

And although the hack was discovered quite quickly, and measures were taken, unfortunately, the balance of the cybercriminals’ wallet indicates that some users still managed to fall for the bait of scammers. The transaction history shows several transfers made from different bitcoin addresses. As a result, the balance of the hackers’ wallet amounted to 0.40571238 BTC, that is, approximately $ 17,000 at the current exchange rate.

Currently, Bitcoin [.] Org is already operating normally. How exactly the attackers managed to compromise the resource remains unclear, and some information security experts suspect that a DNS attack took place.

Let me remind you that we wrote that the British authorities decided to give cybercriminal’s bitcoins as a compensation for its victims, as well as that recently the US authorities imposed sanctions on cryptocurrency exchange Suex.