Testing instances for AV-Check as Twitter account hijacked by NFT spammers • Graham Cluley

Usually the official English-language Twitter account of anti-virus testing organisation AV-Check appears to be like like this:

It doesn’t usually appear like this:

An unauthorised social gathering has seized management of the @avtestorg Twitter account, nuked its profile image and banner, changed its title and outline with a full-stop, and set about retweeting quite a few messages about NFTs. Particularly a set of multi-coloured NFTs referred to as Doodles.

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This isn’t the conventional behaviour of the German-based safety testing service. And certain sufficient, it confirmed late final evening that @avtestorg had been hacked, and that it not longer had any entry.

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Our English-language Twitter account “avtestorg” has been hacked and we not have entry to the account or tweets in the meanwhile. We’re already in contact with the Twitter help to resolve this difficulty as quickly as potential.

— AV-TEST GmbH (DE) (@avtestde) July 25, 2022

Over 12 hours have handed, and Twitter doesn’t seem to have given AV-Check its account again. The unauthorised retweets and defacement of the @avtestorg account are nonetheless seen for anyone to see.

AV-Check informs me that the account was protected by a safe password and two-factor authentication (which I’d anticipate, as AV-Check is aware of what it’s speaking about in terms of safety.) It has not on the time of writing obtained any response from Twitter, however has filed a police report concerning the incident.

We’re seeing increasingly verified Twitter accounts compromised to unfold NFT nonsense. Earlier this month, for example, the official account of the British Military suffered the same destiny.

So, how on earth has this occurred? Has there been a safety lapse at AV-Check or does the issue someway lie at Twitter’s door?

We shouldn’t be too fast accountable immediately the proprietor of a Twitter account after a hack.

In any case, simply two years in the past accounts owned by scores of politicians, celebrities, and enormous organisations immediately began tweeting cryptocurrency-related messages to their many hundreds of thousands of followers, after Twitter didn’t do a adequate job of conserving inside instruments out of the attain of hackers.

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