Scammers Comply with the Rebranding of Twitter to X, to Distribute Malware

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 realize 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 Stay Stream by scammer 

Determine 2. Twitter X Crypto Rip-off 

This kind of rip-off has been lively for some time and makes use of an revolutionary strategy to lure victims. To make this rip-off extra genuine, attackers goal well-known Influencers with sponsorship emails that include 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 Movement 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 publish internet hyperlinks for new rip-off websites in chat, and goal YouTube accounts with a massive variety of subscribers. On different social media platforms, equivalent to Instagram and Twitter, they use compromised accounts to observe customers and publish screenshots with captions, equivalent to “Thanks Mr.Elon”. If we bathroomok for these phrases on Instagram, we observe hundreds of related publishs. Compromised accounts are additionally used to publish movies for software program/recreation purposes, that are malware masquerading as authentic software program or recreations. These movies exhibit how one can 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 

Beneath 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: 

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