Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently confirmed that his X account was hacked through a sim-swap attack, which took over his mobile phone number and accessed his account. The attack was made public by Buterin’s father, Dmitry, who stated that his son was actively trying to regain control of the account. During that time, scammers posted a phishing link accompanied by a false message that announced the release of a commemorative NFT by ConsenSys.Buterin took to the decentralized social media network Warpcast to address the issue and said he had finally regained control of his T-Mobile account. He advised X users to completely remove their phone numbers from their X accounts, adding that he had seen “phone numbers are insecure, don’t authenticate with them” advice before, but had underestimated how much vulnerability is associated with phone numbers in this context.Sim swapping, also known as sim jacking, is an attack where hackers get access to the victim’s phone number. This commonly happens when scammers contact your mobile phone’s carrier and trick them into activating a SIM card that the fraudsters have. Once they have access to your phone number, the hackers then take advantage of a weakness in two-factor authentication and verification and use the phone number to access accounts connected to the phone number, such as an X account in Buterin’s case, as well as banking and crypto accounts. T-Mobile has previously been tied to similar attacks where victims’ T-Mobile accounts are compromised. The telecom operator was sued in 2020 on the grounds that a series of SIM-swap hacks allowed the theft of cryptocurrencies valued at $8.7 million. In 2021, the company was sued again after a customer lost $450,000 in Bitcoin as a result of another SIM-swap attack.Ethereum developer Tim Beiko asked users to enable their 2FA as an additional layer of security. He also suggested that Twitter should default turn on 2FA for accounts with large followings. T-Mobile has also taken steps to increase security and prevent sim-swapping attacks.

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Information	Details
Geography	Global
Countries
Sentiment	negative
Relevance Score	10
People	Hayden Adams, Arthur Madrid, Dmitry Buterin, T-Mobile, Mira Murati, Peeple
Companies	SIM-swap, Tim Beiko, OpenAI, Warpcast, Ethereum, ZachXBT, 2FA, NFT, T-Mobile, Binance, Uniswap, Sandbox, ConsenSys, Proto-Danksharding
Currencies	Bitcoin, Ethereum, Helium Mobile, US Dollar, NFT Stars, Litecoin
Securities	None