Originally published on: December 08, 2024
On December 8th, the Cardano Foundation’s X account fell victim to a hack orchestrated by a malicious actor. The hacker exploited the account to promote a fictitious “ADAsol” token and falsely declared that the foundation would discontinue support for ADA, Cardano’s native cryptocurrency.
Acknowledging the breach, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson disclosed the incident on social media after the scam ADAsol token amassed approximately $500,000 in trading volume and subsequently plummeted by 99%.
Post the scam, both the ADAsol fraudulent link and the announcement of a potential SEC lawsuit were promptly deleted.
While the Cardano Foundation endeavors to rectify the compromised account, it maintains that no other facets of the Cardano ecosystem were impacted by the breach. Nonetheless, users are urged to exercise vigilance and refrain from clicking on any links disseminated via the Cardano Foundation X account until further notice.
The Cardano Foundation isn’t the sole entity to confront threat actors compromising social media pages to distribute bogus links.
In December 2023, Compound Finance’s X account was infiltrated, leading to the dissemination of phishing links imitating the protocol’s website to promote counterfeit COMP tokens, extracting assets from unwary users upon clicking.
Concurrently, in October of the same year, Symbiotic, a restaking protocol, faced an X account breach. The hacker published a post imitating an airdrop checklist purporting to award users points for interacting with it. The links directed users to a phishing platform aimed at expropriating genuine Symbiotic tokens from wallets.
EigenLayer, a renowned restaking protocol, similarly fell victim to an X account breach in October, abused by the threat actor to endorse a phony airdrop campaign.
In a separate incident on October 29th, the founder of Truth Terminal AI’s account was compromised, leveraged by the hacker to promote a deceptive memecoin.
More recently in November, rapper WiKhalifa’s X account was compromised to endorse a fake celebrity memecoin called WIZ, misleading users into believing it was Khalifa’s creation, although he had no association with it.
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