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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin revealed that his X account (Twitter) was compromised, leading followers into a phishing trap. Many lost NFTs and digital assets after believing a fake Ethereum NFT announcement from the breached account.
The post turned out to be fake, and people who responded were directed to a phishing site. In the end, they lost their digital assets, and as per estimate, the stolen tokens involved in the account breach incident reached more than $691,000. Now, Buterin revealed shocking information about his recent hacking experience. He said that a SIM swap caused the incident.
The 29-year-old Ethereum executive explained he was a victim of a SIM-Swap attack where the perpetrators gained access and controlled his X account without authorization. As per CoinTelegraph, Buterin told Farcaster, a decentralized social media network, that he was able to recover his T-Mobile account after the SIM swap.
"Yes, it was a SIM swap, meaning that someone socially engineered T-Mobile itself to take over my phone number," Buterin shared. "A phone number is sufficient to password reset a Twitter account even if not used as 2FA. I had seen the 'phone numbers are insecure, don't authenticate with them' advice before, but did not realize this."
He said he learned through the incident that users can "completely remove a phone from Twitter." In any case, a SIM swap is also called a sim jacking attack because hackers use a special technique to gain control of someone's mobile phone number. Once the crooks take over the number, they can use two-factor authentication (2FA) to easily access the victim's bank account, social media, crypto accounts, and others.
Meanwhile, Coinnounce mentioned that this is not the first time T-Mobile got involved in a hacking attack. The telecom firm made headlines in 2020 after being sued for allegedly allowing a theft where $8.7 million worth of crypto was taken. In 2021, another SIM-swap attack occurred, and a customer lost $450,000 in Bitcoin in this episode.
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