ablokhin
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said Monday that a hacker obtained control of a staffer’s phone number to send out a fake post on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, earlier this month.
This unidentified individual reset the password for the regulator’s X account after gaining control of an SEC employee’s phone number to make the untrue post on Jan. 9. The post said that the SEC had approved spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds to trade on U.S. exchanges, triggering a brief spike in the price of bitcoin (BTC-USD).
On Jan. 10, the agency actually did greenlight 11 spot bitcoin ETFs, allowing them to start trading on Jan. 11.
“Two days after the incident, in consultation with the SEC’s telecom carrier, the SEC determined that the unauthorized party obtained control of the SEC cell phone number associated with the account in an apparent ‘SIM swap’ attack,” an SEC spokesperson said in a statement.
The SEC noted that multi-factor authentication of its X account was disabled last July “due to issues accessing the account,” the spokesperson added. The security feature wasn’t re-enabled until after the incident.
The incident is being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department, FBI, the Department of Homeland Security’s cyber unit, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the SEC’s enforcement unit.
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