Jason Yanowitz, the co-founder of Blockworks took to X to announce that he has fallen victim to a crypto hack.
Yanowitz Security Setup Fails Gives Way to Crypto Hack
The crypto news media boss posted on Saturday night that his account was successfully hacked after several attempts by the perpetrator. To help other netizens avoid a recurrence, Yanowitz shared details of how the exploit was carried out.
At first, he acknowledged that several hackers had been trying to gain access to his account in the last few weeks. This includes email accounts, Twitter (known as X), and his crypto accounts. He knew this because he kept receiving notifications of attempts to log into one of these accounts.
2/ For the past few weeks, people have been trying to get into my accounts.
Crypto accounts, email, twitter, etc… every few days I get an email that someone is trying to access one of my accounts.
Thankfully I have non-text 2FA set up for everything so nothing got hacked.
— Yano 🟪 (@JasonYanowitz) February 3, 2024
The numerous attempts were futile because of a non-text two-factor authentication (2FA) that he had previously set up for his different accounts. However, he got an email, which he shared in his X post, stating that a login attempt had been made on his X account from North Cyprus.
Unfortunately, this attempt was successfully carried out, suggesting that his security setup was not good enough and the hacker had discovered a loophole. In the email, there was an option to “Secure your X account now here” if he wasn’t responsible for the login. The Blockworks co-founder decided to click on this option and he was directed to enter his username and password.
Afterwards, he updated to a new password and this gave him access to his account. Just when he thought this was the end of the phishing attempt, he received another email stating that his email address had been changed. According to Yanowitz, “This was the real hack.”
Upon his self-investigation, he discovered that the original email which looked real was actually not real.
Therefore, he came up with certain takeaways that he thinks the public should be aware of. First, he advised the public to avoid clicking on links, but if they have to then they should review the actual email address.
Yanowitz also urged his followers to set up 2FA for all their accounts. In the case of a hack, he encourages victims to slow down and think about how the attack could have been possible.
Brands and Individuals Encounter Hacks
It is worth noting that this is how these bad actors have been going about attacking the accounts of high-profile individuals and brands.
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was recently hacked just a few hours before it gave its approval to spot Bitcoin ETFs. Markedly, the hacker announced that the regulator had greenlighted the products and this was not the case.
Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple’s CEO also warned his followers of the growing trend of deepfake scam videos on YouTube after a cloned video of him was seen circulating on the internet.
