A new Crypto scam struck again. The official YouTube channel of the South Korean government was compromised by hackers who used it to promote a cryptocurrency scam with the image of Elon Musk, the electric car magnate and Dogecoin enthusiast.
The crypto scam started by hackers changing the name of the government media outlet Yonhap News channel to SpaceX Invest. This was to pretend it was related to the U.S. aerospace manufacturing and space transportation services company owned by Musk.
Elon Musk Impersonated
As soon as the criminals executed the hack, they posted videos of Elon Musk talking about cryptocurrencies on YouTube. However, the government quickly got wind of the situation and began investigating the source of the intrusion. They suspended the account in question for the rest of the day while they proceeded to discover the start of the flaw.
A spokesperson from the South Korean government’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, charged with overseeing the government’s YouTube page, said that Google Korea is working with the ministry to investigate the hack, but suspects that channel’s user identification and password may have been stolen.
Crypto Scam Trends
This is the third official hack of the government in recent weeks; on Thursday, a public-content YouTube channel managed by the Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) was also hacked, which caused the channel’s suspension indefinitely.
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.
With these alarming hack attempts on profiles and big government organizations, is the crypto space a safe place or another virtual war zone?