Unknown persons have gained unauthorized access to the oldest information resource about bitcoin Bitcoin.org and they placed a fraudulent announcement on its main page about the distribution of cryptocurrencies.

Namecheap domain registrar has restricted access to the site.

On September 23, messages appeared on Twitter about a pop-up window that was displayed on the main page of the resource. Users were asked to transfer cryptocurrency to the specified address — the amount sent was promised to be doubled.

Operator Bitcoin.org under the nickname Cobra, he said that the project team is trying to figure out how the attackers managed to gain access to the site. According to him, it may take several days.

Cobra suggested that the problem may be related to the services of Cloudflare, which provides CDN services, DDoS protection, secure access to resources and DNS servers.

In a few hours, the fraudulent address received more than 0.4 BTC worth about $17,800 (at the exchange rate at the time of writing), according to Blockchain.com . Almost all of this amount fell on a single transaction. It is possible that it was committed by hackers themselves.

Scammers often arrange fake distributions of cryptocurrencies. Usually they use the names of celebrities for this — for example, Google founder Sergey Brin, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak or Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Recall that in September, the attackers took advantage of the hype around the presentation of Apple’s new products by organizing a fake distribution of cryptocurrencies.