Hackers push $460M crypto scam via soccer star’s X account — $1M lost in minutes



On Wednesday, hackers controlled soccer star Kylian Mbappe's X account and pushed a crypto scam on his 14 million followers.

ESPN reported that Mbappe is fresh off a transfer to Spanish soccer giant Real Madrid. The deal will see him make over $16 million per year in salary and receive a $166 million signing bonus spread out over the five years of his contract.

The soccer player hadn't made any posts on his X account for about two weeks until a hacker allegedly started sharing memes and statements to his 14.4 million fans.

'This person lost more than $1M in just 1 hour!'

The posts included mocking fellow soccer star Lionel Messi, trolling different professional teams, and even making political statements.

"F*** Israel," a post said with a clown emoji.

About six minutes later, the account made another post with four Palestinian flags, reading, "FREE PALESTINE."

Aside from the fun and games, the hacker promoted a crypto currency pump-and-dump scheme making off with a large sum of money.

With the stolen account, the hacker promoted the coin $MBAPPE, inflating its value by a reported 4,000%. According to Cointelegraph, the hacker's post boosted the coin's market cap to a whopping $460 million before it tanked to less than $100,000 in value.

The hacker made off with an alleged $100,000 profit in about an hour.

'Don’t fall for the $MBAPPE scam.'

However, some savvy investors, likely not involved in the scam, made some money by quickly buying and selling the coin.

One unknown person made a profit of about $125,000 when they bought shares worth $28 when the market cap was at just $80,000.

Other reports popped up about another investor losing around $1 million:

"Someone created a new wallet and spent [$1.03M] to buy ...$MBAPPE in a single transaction," the popular crypto page Lookonchain wrote.

"[It] is now only worth $9.2K. This person lost more than $1M in just 1 hour!"

The scam spread so rapidly that even popular trading platform Crypto.com warned its followers about falling for it.

"Don’t fall for the $MBAPPE scam," it wrote. "Scammers hacked Kyllian [sic] Mbappe's X account today to promote a scam," the attached image said.

Interestingly, the scam mirrors other schemes made by celebrities over recent years. Simply put, notable people can create a coin, buy a significant portion of it, and promote it to their followers as their latest project. Once the market cap is inflated, creators can sell off their shares for a profit. This may not rise to the level of criminal unless they recommend their followers buy-in.

According to Investopedia, a scheme becomes illegal when it makes promises/recommendations about a stock or security based on false, misleading, or greatly exaggerated statements.

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Hackers can steal your data through HDMI cords: 'Governments are worried about this'



A new technique to capture data through HDMI cables is becoming more accurate and easier to decipher.

This technique allows savvy data thieves to spy on your screens, monitors, and, of course, smart TVs if they are in the right area or can capture signals.

While it is not exactly a remote operation for a would-be hacker, individuals may be able to take passwords, data, or anything else transmitted to your screen through an HDMI cable, with greater accuracy than previously thought.

Uruguay's University of the Republic told TechSpot that this method is already being used and thatT governments are aware of it.

'A new avenue for governments and criminals to spy on your data.'

Hackers could potentially steal data from government sources by planting a discreet signal-capturing device within a building or target area to gather electromagnetic signals. Alternatively, a radio antenna could capture signals from HDMI cables outside a government installation.

The HDMI signals leak some electromagnetic radiation transmitted between the source and the display, and then hackers capture those signals, extract the data, and decipher it.

The Uruguayan research team trained an artificial intelligence model based on existing samples of electromagnetic radiation to decipher intercepted signals. This resulted in reconstructing the HDMI signals to 70% completion, which was reportedly good enough to read what was on the screen.

"Your HDMI being hacked is a new avenue for governments and criminals to spy on your data," said Return's managing editor, Peter Gietl. "Although it remains to be seen how effective this attack will be, there is a wide variety of ways for nefarious actors to access your private information. Unfortunately, if the NSA really wants your data, they will most likely be able to get to it."

Return has previously published "The ultimate Return guide to escaping the surveillance state" to give readers easy solutions to protect your privacy.

Believe it or not, it has historically been much easier to steal signals during the era of analog video. Video cables had even greater amounts of leakage in previous generations, but with the advent of HDMI, those signals became more contained and more difficult to decipher when captured.

Lead researcher Federico Larroca claimed "governments are worried about" HDMI data extraction but added that data-sensitive agencies likely already shield their facilities against such exploitations related to electromagnetic signals.

It's worth it, Larroca concluded, even if it comes with a significant cost.

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FACT CHECK: Did Joe Biden Say Account Was Hacked After He Dropped Out?

A post shared on social media purportedly shows a screenshot of a post from President Joe Biden claiming that his account was hacked and he did not suspend his campaign. 🚨🚨🚨 BREAKING!!! pic.twitter.com/L0VzkzIjpm — Rothmus 🏴 (@Rothmus) July 22, 2024 Verdict: False The claim is inaccurate, the tweet cannot be found on his official X account and […]

The China crisis is bigger than Biden's blunders



Contrary to what Joe Biden says, Russia is not the biggest threat facing the United States. The biggest national threat that we’re not talking about is the Chinese Communist Party.

The corporate media and our political leaders are too often stuck on Russia and alleged Russian disinformation. Not that Russia isn’t a problem or a threat. It certainly is both. But Russia’s efforts are almost amateur compared to the sophistication of the Chinese Communist Party in its escalating war against the United States. Our leaders and our media are obsessed with the wrong enemy.

The Chinese Communist Party must be in awe of how easy we’re making it for them.

Sure, individual incidents involving China get reported and discussed, but there is nowhere near the urgent, sustained focus that this threat requires. Every day now, China is probing and exploiting American vulnerabilities — vulnerabilities that are frequently the direct result of left-wing policies and leadership. And that’s absolutely what we’re engaged with. This is what Sun Tzu meant when he said that “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” They are rotting us from the inside.

Probing weaknesses

Consider how China exploits our open borders. The Chinese are in business with the drug cartels. They are actually the “big dog” in the illicit drug industry, and the Mexican drug cartels are the second in line. Most of the drugs that are coming over our border, particularly fentanyl, have been manufactured through ingredients and supplies that come from China.

The Chinese sell the equipment to press fentanyl into pills under the guise of Adderall or any other prescription drug so people will be fooled by it. Then the drug cartels are using this equipment to press pills of death that they send over our borders at the expense of our children’s lives. Why is nobody talking about that?

The same reason we must talk about that spy balloon. Remember the Chinese spy balloon last year? It was spotted by a reporter in Montana on February 1, then it was allowed to drift across the United States for three more days, soaring over major cities and military bases, before it was finally shot down by the U.S. Air Force off the coast of South Carolina. In December, U.S. intelligence officials revealed that the balloon used a U.S.-based internet service provider to navigate and send high-bandwidth collections of data back to China while it made its way across American airspace.

Last month, a Freedom of Information Act request by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project found 14 instances since 2018 of Chinese nationals attempting to enter the U.S. military base at Pearl Harbor while also conducting surveillance, including flying drones over the base. In September, a Chinese man and woman were found taking photos and video near a Pearl Harbor security entrance before fleeing in a car with unidentified plates. There have been 100 similar incidents in recent years of Chinese nationals, often posing as tourists, who have tried to access military bases across the country.

Thanks to the Biden administration’s wide-open border policy, China has a much easier way to get these potential spies inside the United States. During Biden’s three years in office, more than 133,000 Chinese nationals have been encountered at the border, almost 30,000 of those just since last October. There are now more Chinese nationals crossing the border in San Diego than Mexican nationals.

Just last week, three Chinese nationals were arrested trying to cross the border into Maine from Canada in the middle of the night. A fourth, who was driving a car, was arrested on suspicion of attempting to assist the others. Last year, a Border Patrol memo identified 270 suspected properties in rural Maine that are used for illegal marijuana growing and operated by Chinese nationals. The massive profits are funneled back to China or used to finance other illegal activities, including drug and human trafficking.

Self-inflicted wounds

In San Francisco, U.S. sovereignty is being undermined in absurd ways, like a law passed in 2020 that eliminates the requirement to be a U.S. citizen to hold seats on city boards. San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors last month unanimously appointed Kelly Wong to the city’s Elections Commission. Wong is not an American citizen. She’s been in the United States since 2019 and is an immigrant rights activist from Hong Kong.

Wong may have absolutely nothing to do with the Chinese Communist Party. But what if someone in that position did? San Francisco now has someone who is not a U.S. citizen, and cannot legally vote, in charge of supervising its elections.

Regardless where Wong’s national loyalties lie, her political loyalty is apparently left-wing because she works for a group called Chinese for Affirmative Action. According to its most recently published annual report, it is funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Google, and the Tides Foundation, among many other far-left groups.

And then there is one of the most immediately pressing threats to Americans – the Chinese government’s hacking operation.

Last year, the Chinese military hacked into around two dozen U.S. power and water utilities and communications and transportation systems. They breached a water utility in Hawaii, a major port on the West Coast, an oil and gas pipeline, and attempted to hack into the Texas power grid operator.

Despite these urgent threats, in 2022 the Biden administration shut down the “China Initiative” at the Department of Justice. It was a program started in 2018 to prosecute economic espionage and stop the stealing of intellectual property by Chinese government agents. Why did they shut it down? Because left-wing activists said the program allowed the FBI to target Asian Americans unfairly.

A bipartisan affliction

The CCP must be in awe of how easy we’re making it for them. China is flooding the U.S. with such a wide spectrum of attacks that they tend to blend into the background noise of our national chaos. Too few of these attacks get the sustained attention they deserve from our media and leaders.

Why is our administration not doing anything about the border? Why is California Governor Gavin Newsom visiting China and not talking about fentanyl? I believe these people have surrounded themselves with Chinese operatives and Chinese money. I don’t think these people want to answer any questions because their own corruption would be exposed.

So, what does all this mean? At the very minimum, it means that impeachment is probably not enough for this crime. But it’s not just the Democrats, and it’s not just the Bidens. It's the Republicans, too. No one is pointing the finger at China because it would land on their own complicity. Don’t be convinced that China is a lesser threat to America due to the media and political leaders’ inaction and lack of coverage. China is the greatest threat facing our country, and our leaders’ inaction speaks for itself.

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