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 matters on fashionable social media platforms.
Scammers pounced on this chance and began renaming varied 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 energetic for some time and makes use of an modern strategy to lure victims. To make this rip-off extra genuine, attackers goal well-known Influencers with sponsorship emails that comprise 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 Stream 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 dwell stream an Elon Musk video on YouTube. They put up internet hyperlinks for new rip-off websites in chat, and goal YouTube accounts with a massive variety of subscribers. On different social media platforms, reminiscent of Instagram and Twitter, they use compromised accounts to comply with customers and put up screenshots with captions, reminiscent of “Thanks Mr.Elon”. If we lavatoryokay for these phrases on Instagram, we observe 1000’s of comparable put ups. Compromised accounts are additionally used to put up movies for software program/sport functions, that are malware masquerading as authentic software program or sports. These movies display the best way to obtain and execute files, that are widespread password-stealing malware, and distributed by 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:
| Rip-off Website | Crypto Kind | Pockets | |
| twitter-x[.]org | ETH | 0xB1706fc3671115432eC9a997F802aC79CD7f378a | |
| twitter-x[.]org | BTC | 1KtgaAjBETdcXiAdGsXJMePT4AEGWqtsug | |
| twitter-x[.]org | USDT | 0xB1706fc3671115432eC9a997F802aC79CD7f378a | |
| twitter-x[.]org | DOGE | DLCmD43eZ6hPxZVzc8C7eUL4w8TNrBMw9J |
