Bitcoin.org Got Hacked

The Bitcoin.org website, first managed by the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, was recently hacked to promote a fake giveaway scam.

Created in 2008, Bitcoin.org is the first ever website that aims to support the development of Bitcoin and also serves as an educational source for information about the cryptocurrency.

On the 22nd of September, the site’s homepage popped up a message, asking visitors to send any amount of BTC to a given address and receive double the amount in return, limiting the false offer to the first ten thousand senders.

In two Twitter posts by @CryptoCobra, the Bitcoin site maintainer, confirmed the hack, stating that their server was not alerted and did not encounter any traffic during the attack. The pseudonymous site operator further blamed the incident on the Cloudflare network, which the site migrated to about two months ago.

Some on Twitter Crypto did well to prevent oblivious individuals from falling victim to the scam by spreading the “Don’t Send any money, it’s a scam” warning message.

Thankfully, a Bitcoin activist on Twitter was quick to report the issue to web and domain host NameCheap.com, who has already taken down the site. According to @CryptoCobra, the website’s closure is only temporary, “down for a few days” to give time for investigation.

Despite swift observations and responses to scam information, including warning messages, some individuals unfortunately still lost their bitcoin to the scammers. The fraudsters reportedly obtained about $17K worth of Bitcoin (0.4 BTC) from victims.

As at the time of writing this report, the site was no longer accessible.

The issue of scams in the crypto space has been ongoing for some time now. Lately though, there have been a lot more frequent reports of sites pretending to organize giveaways but are truly intent on duping people of their bitcoins and of other cryptocurrencies as well.

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