Hackers targeted a number of prominent Twitter (aka X) users on Wednesday, apparently hijacking accounts of brands and celebrities to post tweets endorsing the shady meme coin, but the Solana token received little attention.
High-profile users who were believed to have been hacked to spread the scam, including the Indian division of computer brand Lenovo, film director Oliver Stone, Yahoo News UK and Brazilian footballer Neymar Jr., were promoting tokens with the ticker “HACKED.”
“Introducing $HACKED on SOLANA,” the tweet read. “I will publish the token address for each account I hack, then pump it and make profits together.”
HACKED is a new meme coin running on Solana, the crypto network that powers the fifth-largest digital coin SOL. Some Twitter accounts have since deleted the tweets.
Anonymous cryptocurrency investigator ZachXBT was the first to publish details about the compromised accounts, noting that the volume of cryptocurrency transactions involved was tiny, and that despite the scale of the attack, the hackers likely only stole around $8,000.
The coin appears to have only generated $278,000 worth of trading volume so far, and its market cap is just $5,700 as of this writing, as its price dropped 96% in an hour. “A strong candidate for most incompetent hacker of the year,” ZachXBT tweeted.
Solana’s network has a variety of use cases, but recently it has become a leading chain for issuing new tokens, including meme coins, or highly volatile cryptocurrencies based on internet jokes, celebrities, or real-world events.
A new platform called Pump.fun, launching in early 2024, will allow anyone to create new meme coins without any technical knowledge or significant costs.
However, hackers have been targeting high-profile Twitter accounts with cryptocurrency scams for years, and in 2020, scammers attacked the accounts of a number of celebrities and brands, including former President Barack Obama, Apple, Uber, and rapper Kanye West, to spread bitcoin scams.
Editor: Andrew Hayward
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