Bitcoin Foundation Official Website Bitcoin.org hacked, BTC Whitepaper Goes Missing

Yet another attack brings down the oldest education resource website for Bitcoin. Bitcoin.org, an open-source project that aims to support Bitcoin development, went corrupt after falling prey to a giveaway scam on 23rd Sep on an early Thursday.

The homepage of Bitcoin.org is now advertising a pop-up page that claims bitcoin sent to a dedicated address will return the doubled amount to the user. A very tempting proposition that is obviously a crypto giveaway scam. 

The fraudulent advertisement stated only the first ten thousand senders could take advantage of the offer. The pop-up included a QR code for the wallet with its address. 

The message read: "The Bitcoin Foundation is giving back to the community! We want to support our users who have helped us along the years. Send Bitcoin to this address, and we will send double the amount in return! Limited to the first 10000 users! Use this QR code or address below."

The address displayed on the bogus ad has already received 0.4 bitcoin worth $17,000. However, no one has yet claimed to have fallen victim to this atrocious scam.

All other functions of the site, including the link for the BTC white paper, went missing. Sametime, the direct URL for the Bitcoin white paper on Bitcoin.org, also shows an error saying, "This site can't be reached."

Previously Bitcoin.org endured a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in July, with hackers demanding a Bitcoin ransom for an unknown quantity of Bitcoin. DDoS is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted with excessive requests to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled. A court in the United Kingdom ordered the website to stop hosting the Bitcoin white paper one week before this attack took place.

The Bitcoin.org domain was registered back in August 2008 was designed to educate and instruct others on buying and selling the crypto. It is commonly known for hosting the Bitcoin Core. The software is used to connect to the Bitcoin network and run a node.

Bitcoin core developers have been on the work for the same. A developer that goes by the name Cobra Bitcoin noted that the incident happened just in two months of moving to the Cloudfare server. He wrote: “Bitcoin.org hasn’t been hacked, ever. And then we move to Cloudflare, and two months later we get hacked. Can you explain where you were routing my traffic too? Because my actual server didn’t get any traffic during hack”.

Another Bitcoin core developer Matt Corallo reached out to the domain hosting website Namecheap. He further asked them to temporarily disable the bitcoin.org domain.