What happened
Late on April 23, 2023 UTC (just after midnight on April 24 in KuCoin's UTC+2 time), attackers took over KuCoin's official Twitter account, @kucoincom, for about 45 minutes. They used it to promote a fake giveaway that claimed to celebrate 10 million users and promised to double any crypto sent to the scam site kucoinevent[.]com. Users made 22 ETH and BTC transfers to the scammers, losing about $22,628.
No KuCoin wallets or exchange systems were breached. KuCoin said exchange assets were safe, promised to fully reimburse all verified losses from the breach, and began examining and blocking suspicious addresses. It also said it would investigate with Twitter how a verified account with two-factor authentication had been hijacked.
How the attackers got in was not disclosed.
Protocol details
Evidence
- analysis DeFiLlama defillama.com
- analysis KuCoin's Twitter account hacked to promote crypto scam (BleepingComputer, 2023-04-24) bleepingcomputer.com
- analysis Kucoin Twitter account compromised, exchange promises reimbursements (The Block, 2023-04-24) theblock.co
- analysis KuCoin to reimburse victims of the short-lived Twitter account hack (Cointelegraph, 2023-04-24) cointelegraph.com
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