The Cardano Foundation’s X account was compromised on December 8 by a threat actor promoting a fake “ADAsol” token and claiming that the Cardano Foundation would halt support for Cardano’s native token, ADA (ADA) due to a lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson confirmed the hack in a social media post, but not before the fraudulent ADAsol token generated approximately $500,000 in trading volume and rapidly crashed by 99%.
Both the ADAsol scam post and the subsequent notice of an impending lawsuit from the SEC have been removed at the time of this writing.
The Cardano Foundation is working to fix the compromised account, and no other parts of the Cardano ecosystem have been affected by the hack. Despite this, users should exercise caution and not click on any links from the Cardano Foundation X account until further notice.
One of the fraudulent posts from the compromised Cardano Foundation X account hack. Source: ZackXBT
Related: Cardano price gains 88% — Is the ADA rally just getting started?
X account hacks are all too common
The Cardano Foundation is far from the only entity to experience threat actors compromising social media pages and posting fraudulent links.
In Dec. 2023, Compound Finance’s X account was hacked. The malicious actor used the social media page to post phishing links to a site that looked nearly identical to the protocol’s website and advertised fraudulent COMP tokens. Clicking on any of the links would drain crypto from unsuspecting users.
Symbiotic — a restaking protocol — experienced an X account hack in Oct 2024. The hacker posted a checklist claiming to give users points for interacting with the post — similar to Airdrop checklists. The links led to a phishing site that would steal legitimate Symbiotic tokens from wallets.
Popular restaking protocol Eigenlayer’s X account was compromised in Oct 2024. The threat actor used the account to promote a fake airdrop campaign.
The founder of the Truth Terminal AI account was also hacked on Oct. 29. The hacker took control of the account to market a fraudulent memecoin.
More recently, in November 2024, rapper Wiz Khalifa’s X account was hacked to shill a fake celebrity memecoin called WIZ. The token was presented to users as a legitimate memecoin from the musical artist but was not affiliated with Khalifa in any way.
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