Yesterday the official Twitter account of the Ministry of Ecological Transition was hacked. Someone stole the credentials and then took possession of the page and modified it to pretend Vitalik Buterinthe founder of the cryptocurrency Ethereum.
The news surprised Italian generalist newspapers, which in some cases had misreported the events for hours, claiming that the account had been hacked by Buterin himself. Obviously this is fake news. In a way, the famous developer is indeed the victim himself as hackers have used his identity to promote yet another cryptocurrency scam. In the same hours the same group of hacker it also violated the pages of ISPI, the authoritative Italian think tank devoted to geopolitics.
After recognizing the error, the Italian media quietly proceeded to amend the articles already published, without, however, announcing the correction – as the ethical rules (or at least fairness to the readers) would like. But that doesn’t matter, because the sensational error had clearly already been noticed and reported by less inexperienced users.
but what we can do I say pic.twitter.com/0pkPGwBAaN
– The crypto gateway (@crypto_gateway) September 15, 2022
Timing is not coincidental: hackers took advantage of the so-called ‘To merge‘, that is the important passage of the network of Ethereum from the Proof-of-work protocol al Proof-of-Stakewhich, in short, tries to solve once and for all the problem of the huge energy consumption previously required for the operation of the cryptocurrency.
Meanwhile, Twitter has already reinstated the MITE and ISPI accounts, which are now no longer under the control of the scammers.
Incidents such as those involving ISPI and MITE are quite common. Hackers – often with brute force techniques and with dozens of accounts at once – steal the credentials of large pages with thousands of followers and especially with the coveted blue check. The credentials are then put up for sale in the many specialized forums of the so-called dark web. They are then usually bought by other criminals, who can use a Twitter verified page with a large following to make their scams more credible.
Source: Lega Nerd
