On September 03, the official YouTube channel of the South Korean government was compromised by a group of hackers who used it to promote a cryptocurrency scam with the image of Elon Musk, the electric car tycoon and Dogecoin enthusiast.
According to local media outlet Yonhap News, the hackers changed the name of the government channel to “SpaceX Invest” to pretend it was related to the U.S. aerospace manufacturing and space transportation services company owned by Musk.
Hackers Target The Accounts of The South Korean Government
Following the hack, the scammers posted several videos of interviews where Elon Musk talked about cryptocurrencies. However, the government managed to quickly detect the hack and proceeded to suspend the account for 4 hours while they tried to identify the origin of the flaw.
A spokesperson from South Korea’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, in charge of managing the YouTube account, said the government is working with Google Korea to determine how the hackers were able to carry their attack, but suspects that the channel’s ID and password may have been stolen.
This is not the first hack suffered by the government this week, as last Thursday, the YouTube channel operated by the Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) suffered a two-day attack, which ended in the channel being suspended indefinitely.
Crypto-Themed Hacks Increased During The Last Week
During the last week, several hacks affected cryptocurrency exchanges, government officials, and even Hollywood stars such as Bill Murray, known worldwide for his role in the movie Ghostbusters.
KyberSwap, a decentralized exchange protocol (DEX), suffered a security breach through a malicious code executed via its Google Tag Manager, which let hackers steal $265,000 worth of crypto. Two days later, Binance confirmed that they managed to identify two of the hackers and are coordinating with the relevant authorities for law enforcement.
Separately, a group of hacktivists identified as “Belarusian Cyber-Partisans” publicly announced that they would sell an NFT with the passport data of Alexander Lukashenko, President of Belarus, obtained after hacking into a government database containing the information of all passports of the country’s citizens.
As CryptoPotato recently reported, a group of hackers managed to steal $185,000 in ETH from a private wallet of Bill Murray containing more than 800 NFTs, including collections of CryptoPunks, Pudgy Penguin, Cool Cat, and Flower Girls. The stolen amount was to be donated to the care of a 3-year-old girl with intractable epilepsy.
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