Phishers earned $ 15,000 in two hours posing as a legitimate Ethereum wallet

[Tomcat]

Independent cybersecurity expert Wesley Neelen discovered an interesting phishing campaign that brought its operators more than $ 15,000 in a matter of hours.

It all started when Nilen received a phishing email allegedly from the administration of the real-life Myetherwallet.com service. The message, which can be seen below, said that the resource is preparing for the upcoming hard fork, in connection with which users are asked to follow the link provided in the letter, unblock the account and check the balance.

The link from the letter led to a site that outwardly completely copied the real Myetherwallet. Moreover, the attackers used Unicode, and if you look closely, you can see in the screenshot below that the letter "T" in the website address has a strange dot at the bottom. The use of special characters allowed the attackers to register a domain as close as possible to the real Myetherwallet.com.

If the victim fell for the scammers and entered their credentials on this fake site, the criminals immediately used this information to enter the victim's real wallet and withdraw all funds.

Although Nielen himself immediately noticed the substitution, the expert decided to study the malicious site more closely, and quickly discovered that some users were much less fortunate than him. Having connected his colleague to the investigation, Nilen discovered a log on the site, which collected data from all wallets affected by the hands of fraudsters. As it turned out, only one of the stolen wallets contained 42.5 ETH, that is, about $ 12,500. Other wallets contained more modest amounts, but in the end, the total "earnings" of criminals still to 52.56 ETH ($ 15,875) in just two hours.

At the end of his report, the specialist notes with sadness that the resource of the scammers is located on the so-called "bulletproof" hosting, so one can hardly expect that someone will listen to complaints, and the site will soon go offline.

I would also like to draw your attention to the fact that this year cybercriminals stole $ 225 million worth of digital currency through phishing attacks. Fraudsters deceived potential investors of token sales on the Ethereum blockchain, luring them into fake Internet addresses.

According to Chainalysis, more than 30,000 investors have been victims of ether-related cybercrimes. On average, they each lost $ 7,500.

According to Chainalysis co-founder Jonathan Levin, cybercriminals are attracted by the huge profits generated by ICO organizers. So, token sales in 2017 have already raised over $ 1.6 billion in funding.