Authored by: Vallabh Chole and Yerko Grbic

On July twenty third, 2023, Elon Musk introduced that the social networking website, Twitter was rebranding as “X”. The information propelled Twitter and X to achieve headlines and turn into the highest trending subjects on widespread social media platforms. 

Scammers pounced on this chance and began renaming numerous hacked YouTube and different social media accounts to “twitter-x” and “twitter fund” to advertise rip-off hyperlinks with new X branding. 

Determine 1. Twitter-X-themed YouTube Dwell Stream by scammer 

Determine 2. Twitter X Crypto Rip-off 

This kind of rip-off has been lively for some time and makes use of an progressive method to lure victims. To make this rip-off extra genuine, attackers goal well-known Influencers with sponsorship emails that include password-stealing malware as e mail attachments. When password stealer malware is executed, the influencer’s session cookies (distinctive entry tokens) are stolen and uploaded to attacker-controlled programs. 

Determine 3. Malware Circulate Chart  

After the influencer’s account has been compromised, the scammer begins to rename channels, on this case to “Twitter CEO” and then the scammers begin to reside stream an Elon Musk video on YouTube. They publish net hyperlinks for new rip-off websites in chat, and goal YouTube accounts with a massive variety of subscribers. On different social media platforms, corresponding to Instagram and Twitter, they use compromised accounts to comply with customers and publish screenshots with captions, corresponding to “Thanks Mr.Elon”. If we bathroomok for these phrases on Instagram, we observe 1000’s of comparable publishs. Compromised accounts are additionally used to publish movies for software program/recreation functions, that are malware masquerading as official software program or recreations. These movies display learn how to obtain and execute files, that are frequent password-stealing malware, and distributed by way of compromised social media accounts.

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Determine 4. McAfee WebAdvisor detection 

Under is a detection heatmap for rip-off URL’s focusing on twitter-x and selling crypto scams.   

Determine 5. Rip-off URL Detection Heatmap 

Determine 6. Password stealer Heatmap 

Indicators of Compromise: 

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