A couple of days ago, there was a hack on the official Litecoin X profile.
Litecoin's X account was briefly compromised today and posts that were not authorized were published. These were live only for a matter of seconds before being deleted. We're still investigating the issue, but immediately found a delegated account that was compromised and removed…
— Litecoin (@litecoin) January 11, 2025
The problem has already been identified and resolved.
The hack to the X profile of Litecoin
Once in possession of the official Litecoin X profile, the hackers began to use it to promote a fraudulent token launched on the Solana network.
To promote it, the hacker posted a tweet, now removed, containing an address and a link to the page on Pump.fun of the bull token.
After regaining full control of the X profile, the owners wrote that the fraudulent tweets were online for only a few seconds before being deleted, and that they discovered the cause of the problem was a compromised delegated account, which was then removed.
Professional X profiles can indeed delegate to other profiles the ability to publish tweets, therefore anyone who manages to breach one of the delegated profiles effectively also gains the ability to post. Fortunately, however, it is very easy and quick for the true owners of the professional profiles to remove the delegations, thus resolving the problem in very short time.
“`html
The scam
“`
The scam tokens launched on the Solana network are increasingly numerous.
By now, in fact, on one hand, it is very easy and economical to launch a token on Solana, while on the other hand, it is very easy to promote it on Pump.fun.
In fact, there are several thousand tokens that are advertised through Pump.fun, and of these, only a tiny portion are serious projects.
The vast majority are either pastimes, jokes (memecoin), oddities, or outright scams. In this case, since the token was being passed off as the official one of Litecoin, it was an outright scam.
However, the fact that they are “pumped” on DEX using tools like Pump.fun suggests that they are largely attempts at more or less conscious fraud, and more or less illegal, since they are often projects based on deception to try to sell worthless tokens.
In this specific case, the scam was advertised thanks to a hack of a historical X profile, with more than a million followers, exploiting a vulnerability in the security of one of the accounts delegated to post.
Litecoin (LTC)
The crypto project Litecoin is absolutely one of the oldest, after Bitcoin.
In fact, it dates back to 2011, and initially it was presented as a faster and cheaper version of Bitcoin.
Over the years, however, it has lost a lot of strength, mainly due to competition. First Ethereum, and then fast and cheap blockchains like Tron and Solana, have relegated Litecoin to a secondary role, so much so that it has now abundantly fallen out of the top 10.
The market capitalization of its native cryptocurrency, LTC, is now even lower than that of Uniswap or Polkadot, roughly in line with that of Pepe.
Despite this, in 2021 the price of LTC still managed to update its all-time highs, but only slightly surpassing those of 2017.
Currently, it is still at -75% from the highs, also because in 2023 it only marked a small rebound after the bear-market of 2022, and in 2024 it did not manage to take off.
The problem is that for years this seems to be a relatively stagnant project, at a time when other crypto projects are continuing to run.