I didn’t expect that the plot could be so exciting, and that we, the currency speculators, could be deceived twice by the same thing.

On January 10, the U.S. SEC officially announced on social media that the Bitcoin spot ETF was approved. This tweet instantly received millions of views. The emotions have accumulated to this point, and coupled with this news that the cryptocurrency industry has been waiting for for several years, no one will think that there will be any problem with these few lines.

If you could have seen the comments under that tweet at that time, you would have been infected by people's emotions, opened the trading platform, followed the positive green candle of Bitcoin, and placed your own buy order.

Here comes the abstract thing.

SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said a few minutes later that "spot ETFs were approved" was false news. The reason is that the SEC’s official Twitter was stolen, and the tweet just now was sent by a hacker.

Affected by false news, the price of Bitcoin fluctuated violently. After rising close to $48,000, it quickly dropped below $45,000, with a short-term fluctuation range of nearly 10%. According to Coinglass data, the Bitcoin market liquidated $56.2 million in the past hour, with long positions accounting for about 60%.

The market is also confused as to who had the SEC and Chairman Gensler’s tweets stolen.

The market was once again deceived by news of ETF approval

This is the second time the market has been deceived by the same news.

In October last year, the veteran cryptocurrency media Cointelegraph published the news on social media that the Bitcoin ETF was approved by the SEC in all capital letters. In less than half an hour, the tweet had nearly 1.5 million views and a market value of 5,500. Bitcoin’s worth of US$100 million has broken through multiple integer digits, reaching US$30,000. Subsequently, multiple sources came forward to refute the rumors, and Bitcoin fell back above $27,000, ending the 10-minute climax.

Related reading: " A piece of fake news worth $100 million that can go down in history "

Three months later, with the arrival of the bull market, the price of Bitcoin has already stabilized above US$40,000, but whether the spot ETF is approved or not still affects the direction of the market. At the beginning of the year, Matrixport reported that the SEC was expected to reject all proposals in January. As soon as the news came out, Bitcoin immediately recovered after falling below $41,000, and even briefly exceeded $47,000 on January 9.

But unlike the false news reported by Cointelegraph, when multiple sources came forward to refute the rumors, different voices emerged this time. Among them, Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas said on his social platform that although there are clues pointing to the theft of SEC Official Twitter tweets, he is more inclined to believe that the false news came from within the SEC, or that "SEC employees prepared a planned Tweeted but entered the wrong date", because the wording of the tweet is very consistent with the SEC style, so it is not a simple prank.

Eric Balchunas also pointed out that the SEC is expected to announce the approval of the Bitcoin spot ETF from 16:00 to 17:00 EST on Wednesday (5:00 to 6:00 a.m. on Thursday, Beijing time) and it will be listed on Thursday local time. BlockBeats has compiled ETF related progress, please refer to " Timeline | Bitcoin Spot ETF Related Progress Tracking ".

The Bitcoin spot ETF decision is not only related to the price changes of Bitcoin, but will also become a turning point for the entire cryptocurrency market. If the adoption of Bitcoin spot ETF is inevitable, then it is particularly important to know the real news about whether it has passed or not as soon as possible. In addition to paying attention to the Official Twitter news from the SEC, other identification methods can be found in " About Bitcoin Spot ETF, 5 Key Things You Must Pay Attention to Currently" information ".

Twitter under Musk is already a hacker’s paradise

In recent months, well-known opinion leaders (KOL) have become the main targets of social engineering attacks. Official Twitter accounts of projects have also been frequently stolen. Even the Twitter accounts of well-known security companies in the industry have been stolen and attached with phishing messages. Links, a large number of users' wallets were emptied due to clicking on phishing links.

Although the theft of Twitter accounts occurred long before Musk took over, and relevant news has been reported from time to time since then. But what was stolen today was the SEC, which affects the development of the entire cryptocurrency. Discussions about Twitter security have reached a climax.

According to reports, as early as July 15, 2020, hackers used social engineering to access Twitter management tools through Twitter employees. 130 well-known Twitter accounts were hacked by external parties to post fraudulent tweets. Within minutes, one of the wallet addresses More than 320 transactions took place, and more than $118,000 worth of Bitcoin was stolen.

Initially, among the exploited accounts were well-known media and project parties such as Coinbase, CoinDesk, and Binance. Later, the scam moved to more eye-catching accounts, and among these personal accounts, the first tweet was Sent by Musk himself.

In the wake of what has been described as the "worst hack to date on a major social media platform," former members of Twitter's security department say the company has received reports of potential insider attacks and other cyber threats since 2015. Alarm for safety measures, but these have been put on hold in favor of more revenue-generating initiatives.

Now that Twitter has been taken over by Musk, these so-called "cybersecurity measures" seem to be still being shelved.

According to incomplete statistics from BlockBeats, the person who was initially attacked by social workers was the editor-in-chief of the American mainstream media "Forbes". After communicating with encrypted Kol@0xmasiwei about friend.tech and other fake SocialFi projects, the impostor sent him a friend.tech "identity verification" link. After verification by SlowMist security personnel, the link is a phishing link.

Two months later, major KOLs such as @0xKofi, @0xcryptowizard, and @0xSea all revealed their experiences of social engineering attacks. In addition, the Official Twitter of projects such as the ARPG dark treasure-grabbing chain game "SERAPH: In the Darkness", the decentralized financial protocol Set Protocol, the DeFi lending platform Compound, and the Solana ecological NFT lending protocol Sharky have successively released phishing links, and even Even security company CertiK is not immune.

Related reading: “ Musk’s Twitter has become a hacker’s paradise ”

Many community netizens reported that after clicking on these officially released phishing links, their wallets were instantly emptied. Among them, @Crypto_w59 stated that he lost nearly $350,000 in such incidents.

On January 3, a screenshot of a hacker forum circulated online, showing that hackers had stolen the email addresses and phone numbers of more than 200 million Twitter users. While it's not entirely certain whether the data is real and comes from Twitter, Troy Hunt, the creator of the website Have I Been Pwned, said the data looks "pretty much as described."

Twitter did not respond to inquiries about the data breach.

However, according to Safety's investigation into the "U.S. SEC official Twitter theft" incident, the intrusion was due to an unidentified individual controlling the phone number associated with the U.S. SEC account through a third party.

This is obviously not a good thing, but Musk, the owner of Twitter, doesn’t seem to care. After all, he once enjoyed the way a piece of news stirs up the secondary market. He didn't take it too seriously to watch the excitement, but he made fun of it afterwards.