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Cryptocurrency phishing attacks increased by over 215% in August, partly due to a single significant attack causing losses exceeding $55 million. Crypto phishing attacks involve hackers sharing fake links with investors to steal sensitive information, such as crypto wallet private keys.
Losses Increased in August
Scam Sniffer reported on September 3 that crypto phishing attacks cost the sector over $66 million in August. Around 9,145 victims lost approximately $63 million to crypto phishing scams in August. While the number of victims decreased by 34% compared to July, the amount stolen increased by 215%.
Phishing attacks are becoming increasingly common in the crypto space. In May, an investor lost $71 million worth of crypto in the year’s most notable phishing attack. The attacker tricked the investor into sending 99% of their funds to the attacker’s address.
A large portion of the value stolen in August was attributed to a single large-scale phishing attack worth $55 million. On August 20, an unfortunate cryptocurrency owner signed a transaction in the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Maker, changing the ownership of 55.47 million Dai (DAI). This signature allowed the ownership of stablecoin assets to be taken by a phishing address. After realizing the mistake, the investor tried to withdraw the funds quickly, but the ownership change had already occurred, causing the transaction to fail.
Crypto Market and Security Issues
The crypto industry is increasingly taking measures to protect against cyberattacks. SEAL, an anti-hack intervention team led by white-hat hacker and Paradigm researcher Samczsun, has handled over 900 hack-related tickets since their launch in August 2023. The world’s largest exchange is also combating crypto scammers. Binance‘s security experts have developed a solution to counter the increasing instances of scams where investors are tricked into willingly sending money to a fraudulent address.
Address poisoning or address spoofing is a scam where fraudsters send a small amount of crypto assets to a wallet that closely resembles the potential victim’s address, making it part of the wallet’s transaction history and hoping the victim will mistakenly copy and send money to their address.
Binance’s algorithm detects fake addresses by first identifying suspicious transfers, such as those with near-zero value or unknown tokens, matching them with potential victim addresses, and timestamping malicious transactions to find the potential poisoning point.
