The cybersecurity company took a close look at phishing pages targeting potential investors in cryptocurrencies, as well as malicious files that are distributed under the names of the 20 most popular cryptocurrency wallets. Since the beginning of 2022, they have detected and prevented almost 200 thousand attempts to steal digital currencies and user credentials for their wallets.
The number of such attempts reached about 50 thousand in Aprilalmost half of the indicators for the first quarter of 2022. LCrypto wallets are the main target of scammers because they are the initial place of storage of cryptocurrencies and handle large amounts of virtual money.
In 2022, the company’s cybersecurity technologies registered 193,125 phishing attempts aimed at potential investors in cryptocurrencies or users interested in mining them. Throughout the first quarter of this year, they discovered about 107 thousand attempts.
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Scammers mimic official crypto wallet websites and lure victims into entering a personal seed phrase, a 12- or 24-word secret phrase that ensures wallet security, along with a password and private key. Once the user shares their secret phrase, they are redirected to the real website. Nevertheless, by then, your account and all your savings are in the hands of the scammer.
In fact, crypto wallets have become the target of numerous malicious and scam activitieswhich include not only phishing pages disguised as the most popular wallets, but also malware distributed on their behalf. Kaspersky analyzed malicious files being distributed using the names of 20 of the most popular cryptocurrency wallets.
As a result, the company found that, in the first five months of 2022, they had prevented more than 1,100 users from downloading more than 1,400 different variants of malicious files distributed under the names of the analyzed crypto wallets. Of the malicious files discovered, 75% were targeting the Binance exchange. It was followed by Electrum (10%) and MetaMask (9%). Most of the time, scammers distributed Trojan downloaders, programs that download and install new versions of other malicious programs. Nevertheless, among the analyzed files they also found bankers, spyware and ransomware.
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“Scammers will stop at nothing to steal cryptocurrencies. With the rising value of digital currencies, scammers have stepped up their scamming activities towards potential investors. Crypto phishing scams deserve special attention as they are based on social engineering, these attacks do not require any advanced technical skills to start and work well for scammers. They are often successful due to a lack of user attention and knowledge. Therefore, users should beware of the basic indicators of scams: overly generous offers, proposals from unknown senders, and requests for money with the promise of future earnings.” says Alexey Marchenko, director of research for content filtering methods at the company.
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Source: Elcomercio
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