Elon Musk-Crypto Scam Is All Over Youtube

As per reports, Hackers have attacked several South Korean YouTube channels in the last few months. The hackers used the YouTube channel to broadcast cryptocurrency-related videos to scam the viewers. The South Korean government’s official YouTube channel was one of the first victims of this scam. The cyber criminals compromised the YouTube channel to promote a crypto scam by projecting Elon Musk’s AI-generated video. 

Alert For South Koreans

Recent news was outbursted how the hackers compromised the YouTube channels of the South Korean government, Korea Tourism Organization, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. Hackers were able to gain complete access to the channel. They renamed the account to SpaceX Invest to convince consumers it was somewhat related to the American spacecraft led by Elon Musk. 

To make it look more legit, the scammers uploaded video interviews of Musk where he talks about Bitcoin and other digital currencies. When the government was notified of the situation, they quickly reacted to the fraud within a few hours. Many individual YouTube channels were compromised. A popular channel with over 560,000 subscribers was compromised. The hackers then started broadcasting videos of illegal software that investors should download that can make them rich.

Park Tae-hwan, the team leader at AhnLab’s security emergency response center, highlighted the real purpose of most scammers. They wish to gain access to these popular channels to promote their fraudulent crypto schemes to large audiences and scam innocent people. He warned that every organization should test its security response system and protect itself from these attacks.

A professor at Korea University, Kim Seung-Joo further explained the three main hacking methods used by these scammers. These are phishing attacks and credential stuffing, malware, and information stealers. He believes that scammers are smart to target individual YouTube channels and not the platform.

Events In the UK

The media has reported the presence of scams not only in South Korea. But also in other parts of the world. A similar attack on the YouTube channel of the British Army happened. And the hackers were promoting two different fraudulent crypto schemes. They uploaded previous interviews of famous people who passionately talk about cryptos recently like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey.

UK's Ministry of Defence was able to cope with the problem in a few hours. In a public statement, they said, "Apologies for the temporary interruption to our feed. We will be conducting a full investigation & will learn from this incident. Thank you for staying with us! We will soon resume the services.  

Similar Incident At Indian Embassy

A few weeks ago, the official Twitter account of the Embassy of Oman in India was compromised. Hackers replaced the profile picture of the account with Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse. They then used the reply option to spam fake XRP giveaways using phishing links. The Twitter handle OmanEmbassy_Ind was showing retweets matching Garlinghouse. It was a similar attempt to make the hack look legit. The hacked Twitter handle began responding to tweets using the hashtag XRP. This encouraged users to sign up for a fake giveaway of 100 million tokens worth roughly $42 million. Accounts of all the users who signed up using the spam link ended up compromised.

Garlinghouse is a group of hackers and is reportedly behind this scam. They were also responsible for breaching the Twitter handle of CoinDCX, an India-based crypto exchange. Similar fake giveaways were broadcasted using the handle. CoinDCX soon restored access to its account.