Fake News In Cryptocurrency - The MyEtherWallet Hack That Likely NEVER Happened
CoinTelegraph.Com recently released an article regarding a statement made by https://www.myetherwallet.com about rumors that have been circulated over the last few weeks that the site had been hacked. The rumors appear to have been circulated by the 'Ethereum Blue' Team (a current ICO) on their Twitter Account. The image below shows some of the tweets that they sent out.
MEW (MyEtherWallet) responded with the following:
Now, keep in mind, some of the tweets have been deleted by BLUE, which points to them not being comfortable sticking by their stance, which gives reason to be wary about anything they're currently saying regarding this story. They also didn't provide additional, necessary detail or the details of why they believed what had happened did. That said, MEW sticks by their statement that there are not any known compromises at current time; they are a veteran team that has provided countless wallets to users of the Ethereum Blockchain; they have strong technical team and they have done what they can to confirm that no hack has occurred. Always be aware of sites you're visiting to the best of your ability, but also take things with a grain of salt. This is more important than ever, because News Inaccuracy is becoming more and more rampant by the day.
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The people involved in this ICO has shown themselves to be of dubious character and should be avoided. Unfortunately with the ICO market being red-hot, they will likely still attract enough speculators to subscribe.
But the writers in the online media who had propagated the fake news should be ashamed of themselves. For being too quick to publish things without making any effort to verify first. And showing themselves to be without much integrity and professionalism.
I agree that people need to vet all info they hear before they believe it as there is a lot of fake news out there now-a-days. That being said I have heard some people say that all you have to do is go to the official sources Twitter (MEW in this case) and see what they have to say and base your opinion on that source and that source alone. The issue with this is twitter accounts can also get hacked so people should be cautious to even trust the most official of sources as even they can sometimes get compromised. As an example of this a nightmare scenario would be something like MEW getting DNS poisoned, and at the same time their official twitter getting hacked saying its FUD and isn't true... this would get a lot of users to fall right into the trap and could potentially get a lot of users to use MEW during a time when it is compromised due to blind trust in the info they are told from the "said-to-be official source". Not saying that is what happened in this case as this does appear to be completely fake, but it is something to keep in mind as I could easily see a scenario like this taking place some time in the future, and if/when it does it could have major negative impacts on the crypto space and peoples trust in general.
Yeah, very dangerous, and in some circumstances, it might be impossible to mitigate, but hopefully they have backup channels of communication/the ability to go live on YouTube (for example) to make sure people are informed.
@biddle, I don't know what make more damage, a bunch of trolls or a huge news spreading FUD. Really, people nowadays don't think twice in spread bad news about something, my guess is that they don't even sarch about to see if that rumor is true or not and this is very problematic because could shake de pillars of trust of a entire organization.
XD i thoufht it was the end for me when that rumor was circulating 😂😂 luckily it was just a another fake news 😂😂
haha so true! :)
This is just to create a panic among users...... Thanks for writing this article @biddle!!
yes it's looks a bit suspicious
i don't what people gain with with all the lies
Shows the true colors. Not trustworthy at all. People always trying to scam.
Seriously!
Rubbish BLUE.
He should say sorry to all.
Same like @monjan says: I really dont understand what the idea is to scare millions of people to their bones. Only if you are the concurrent who wants to grow over the back of fake news that is....
Its gonna be more and more I guess
Yeah, not entirely sure of their motives, but it's definitely not out of the realm of possibility that this was done purely to get their ICO trending. Very scary stuff; misinformation is becoming more and more dangerous!