Delhi Capitals, an Indian Premier League cricket team, was breached by X hackers who advertised a Solana-based token with the ticker HACKER to the team’s over 2.6 million followers
In the deleted posts, the bad actors claimed credit for the hack and announced their plans to “make profits” by targeting additional X accounts to boost the price of the HACKER token, which DEX screener data shows was minted a day earlier.
“We hack accounts. The token address will be posted on each account, and the token will pum”,” the attackers said.
Such attacks are prevalent since fraudsters use high-profile X accounts’ enormous follower bases to promote crypto coins. They boost the token’s price and then sell their pre-acquired holdings, leaving naïve investors hoping for a quick profit at a loss.
The perpetrators consistently posted the token’s contract address:” ch $HACKER to see our strength.” Delhi Capitals management recovered account control shortly after.
Searching X for “$HACKER” revealed posts from another hacked account revealing screenshots of similar attacks on South Korean esports club T1 and other X accounts with the same message but a different contract address.
The HACKER token received little attention; hence, the attacker seems to have failed. At press time, the hoax token had a $4,300 market valuation and 46 transactions, most of which were conducted by the developers shortly after its inception.
Hackers keep bypassing X’s security.
However, these attacks appear to be part of a rising pattern where cybercriminals target high-profile X accounts to promote fraudulent cryptocurrencies, increasing security concerns. Facebook has not addressed this issue.
On Sep. 4, Lara and Tiffany Trump’s accounts were hijacked to convince the public to acquire a phony token promoting former president Donald Trump’s decentralized finance enterprise, World Liberty Financial.
A pump-and-dump strategy using the MBAPPE token was used to penetrate Kylian Mbappé days previously.