OpenAI’s official press account on X seems to have been compromised by the identical cryptocurrency scammers who did the identical with firm management in earlier months.
Late Monday afternoon, OpenAI Newsroom, an account OpenAI just lately created to highlight product- and policy-related bulletins, posted a few supposedly new OpenAI-branded blockchain token, “$OPENAI.”
“We’re very completely happy to announce $OPEANAI [sic]: the hole between Al and blockchain know-how,” the submit learn. “All OpenAI customers are eligible to say a chunk of $OPENAI’s preliminary provide. Holding $OPENAI will grant entry to all of our future beta applications.”
In fact, $OPENAI doesn’t exist — and the submit on X linked to a phishing website designed to imitate the reputable OpenAI web site (minus the conspicuously incorrect URL “token-openai.com”). A outstanding “CLAIM $OPENAI” button on the pretend website inspired unsuspecting customers to attach their cryptocurrency wallets, seemingly in an try and steal these customers’ login credentials.
As of publication time, each the submit and website have been nonetheless up — as was a repost and a reply promising “additional info” concerning the token “[to] come later within the week.” Feedback on the malicious X submit have been disabled, making the hack much less apparent than it is likely to be in any other case.
We’ve reached out to OpenAI and X for remark and can replace this text if we hear again.
It’s not the primary time accounts related to OpenAI have been compromised as part of phishing campaigns.
In June 2023, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s account posted an identical message selling the fictional $OPENAI crypto token. And simply three months in the past, the accounts of OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki and OpenAI researcher Jason Wei have been hacked and used to publish rip-off posts an identical to the submit on the OpenAI Newsroom account right now.
Coinspeaker, reporting on the hack of Murati’s account final June, stated that the scammers used a “crypto drainer” device that may funnel all of the NFTs and tokens that victims had of their wallets to the scammers’ pockets as soon as they signed into the pretend OpenAI website.
Different high-profile X accounts belonging to tech corporations and celebrities have been hacked in recent times to advertise crypto scams. In maybe essentially the most notorious instance, in 2020, hackers focused accounts belonging to Apple, Elon Musk and Joe Biden to submit the handle of a bitcoin pockets with the declare that the quantity of any funds made to the handle could be doubled and despatched again.
Individuals misplaced $5.6 billion to cryptocurrency scams in 2023, a forty five% enhance from 2022, in response to the FBI. 2024 is on monitor to be as dangerous — or worse. Greater than 50,000 scams have been reported by means of the primary half of this yr, costing customers near $2.5 billion, per the FTC.
