One new campaign has come to our notice recently regarding the cyber attacks that have been taking place recently due to the COVID-19 situation. It is also known that the Coronavirus situation has increased the cyber threats and many attacks have taken place due to this reason.
However, the fact that they have been using this epidemic to gain money or popularity is something that should worry a lot of people. Now, we have a new problem on hand where it is known that hackers are targetting YouTube accounts and hijacking them to spread fake information.
As per the reports, hackers are targetting some accounts and renaming them as Microsoft accounts from different locations in order to spread fake ponzi scams regarding cryptocurrency. What’s more is that these hackers are then livestreaming those schemes while putting the face of Microsoft’s former founder and CEO Bill Gates. This obviously helps them enable a reputation among users but is clearly a fake campaign. The sad part is that these live streams have had 10,000 to 15,000 users watching which means that many must have been scammed already.
Now, this is not the first time that such a campaign has come to light because we have already seen such Twitter campaigns where accounts which are verified and have a good amount of followers are spreading cryptocurrency information for their followers.
As per the information obtained right now, it is revealed that “Spokespersons for Microsoft and YouTube denied that hackers breached any of Microsoft’s verified official accounts, although some users reported scam streams appearing on non-verified Microsoft accounts”.
Talking about the scam and its effectiveness, a report mentions that “Some of the Bitcoin addresses listed in the scams had received thousands of US dollars at the time of writing” which means many have been scammed due to the live streams.