The U.S. Securities and Trade Rate (SEC) has sure the muse reason within the lend a hand of its hacked X story, which sparked an perfect quantity of controversy after a untrue post about the supposed approval of a local Bitcoin change-traded fund (ETF) made the rounds on social media.

In a teach on Monday, a spokesperson for the SEC stated that the agency had sure that an unauthorized celebration used to be in a position to reach salvage admission to to the X story by gaining handle watch over of the telephone quantity associated with the story by a “SIM swap” attack.

A SIM swap attack takes location when a hacker convinces a telephone carrier to interchange a cell quantity to a SIM of their possession. As of final August, spherical $13.3 million had been stolen from 54 attacks focusing on folk within the crypto alternate by myself.

“As soon as as a lot as speed of the telephone quantity, the unauthorized celebration reset the password for the @SECGov story,” stated the spokesperson.

“Among moderately a ramification of issues, laws enforcement is presently investigating how the unauthorized celebration bought the carrier to alternate the SIM for the story and the plot the celebration knew which telephone quantity used to be associated with the story.”

The regulator remains to be working with federal entities like the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Division of Hometown Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Company to analyze.

The SEC spokesperson also stated that multi-reveal authentication (MFA) on the legitimate SEC X story had been disabled at their demand for the final six months, as a result of components connected to accessing the story. The SEC has since re-enabled MFA on the story after it used to be compromised on Jan. 9.