Again: OpenAI's official Twitter account taken over by crypto fraudsters
The official Twitter account of the press office of ChatGPT provider OpenAI has been taken over by fraudsters and used to promote a fake cryptocurrency.
One of OpenAI's official Twitter accounts has been taken over by fraudsters.
(Image: Shutterstock/ioda)
On Monday, the user profile of the press office of AI startup and ChatGPT provider OpenAI on X, formerly Twitter, announced the launch of a (fictional) cryptocurrency called $OPENAI. The cryptocurrency was intended to "bridge the gap between AI and blockchain technology". Furthermore, "all OpenAI users are entitled to secure their share of the currency". Owners were given access to OpenAI's future beta programs.
The tweet, which linked to a phishing page that, according to the US online medium TechCrunch, is modeled on the real OpenAI website, has since been deleted, but the fake website is still online. When you call up the URL, you are now greeted with the message that it is probably a phishing website.
According to the US news portal TechCrunch, unsuspecting visitors who were not already suspicious because of the URL token-openai.com were prompted to link their crypto wallets to the service with a prominent button labeled "CLAIM $OPENAI". As is usual with such scams, most likely in order to plunder the wallets afterwards.
Fifth breach in two years
According to Bloomberg, OpenAI stated that it was aware of the takeover of its press office's X account, but the company remained silent on further details. There has not yet been a statement regarding the takeover of the X press office account. The user account was apparently only created in June and has only been in active use for a few weeks. The account has just over 54,000 followers on X, but it is not yet clear how many of them fell victim to the scam. If the attackers had taken over the company's official main account, the damage could have been many times greater: This has more than three million followers.
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According to the US financial news portal Cointelegraph, attackers have already managed to take over X user accounts associated with OpenAI several times in the past two years and misuse them for fraud attempts. In four out of five cases, the fictitious $OPENAI currency was propagated to plunder the crypto wallets of X users willing to invest, most recently around three months ago. At that time, the account of OpenAI CTO Mira Murati was among those hit.
However, OpenAI suffered its biggest data leak last year. At the time, an attacker is said to have found a way to read the company's internal chats. OpenAI only announced the incident months later.
(kst)
