The decentralized exchange PancakeSwap reported that its official Chinese account on X (formerly Twitter) had been hacked, which the attackers used to promote a fake memecoin called Mr Pancake.

“Our Chinese account PancakeSwapzh has been compromised. Please do not click on any recent links or interact with the posts. Our team is investigating to resolve the issue. Updates will be shared only through this official account @PancakeSwap,” the project team said.

PancakeSwap later clarified that it was “actively working with Team X to resolve the issue with PancakeSwapzh” and urged users to remain vigilant.

Despite the hack, the price of the CAKE token was practically unaffected. According to CoinGecko, at the time of writing, the asset rose by 9.6% per day, reaching an intraday high of $4.55, before dropping to $4.39.

According to Shan Zhang, Chief Information Security Officer at Slowmist, the main reason for the frequent attacks is low user awareness and phishing schemes:

“Social media accounts are easily hacked because many controllers have weak security awareness and are susceptible to phishing attacks.”

He recommends using two-factor authentication, complex and unique passwords, and increasing cyber education to avoid compromising accounts.

Meanwhile, Alex Katz, CEO of Kerberus, added:

“People are easy to target. This is why so many of them get compromised regularly, from an employee managing a company’s social media to a SAFE developer.”

Katz stressed that the responsibility for security lies with companies, which must strictly implement these protocols.

The incident is yet another example of the vulnerability of large crypto projects on social media, which are increasingly being targeted by hackers. Recently, the official Chinese account of BNB Chain on X suffered from a similar attack. The incident was reported by former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ), who noted that hackers distributed phishing links via Wallet Connect and managed to get $13,000 before the account was restored.

Similar cases have occurred before, such as the hacking of the Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) account on X to publish a fake airdrop, and the attack on the Nasdaq account to promote the STONKS memecoin, whose capitalization jumped to $85 million before falling to $600,000.