A brief look at Twitter will show a fair reflection of scams that are trying to use Ethereum to entice people, to sham giveaways and other such malicious hacks. It has even led to a number of prominent figures on Twitter indicating in their name that they are not giving away ETH.
However, it is not only these types of giveaways that are piggybacking off the second-biggest cryptocurrency by market cap, a report by Kaspersky Lab has stated that Ethereum is currently the most popular cryptocurrency with phishers.
Q2 report
In its ‘Spam and Phishing in Q2 2018’ report, Kaspersky Labs said that malefactors actively used General Data Protection Regulation, the Football World Cup, cryptocurrency themes, and links to malicious websites, as well as in marketing messages served by large search engines, in the second quarter.
In terms of the cryptocurrency scams, it reported blocking as many as 58,000 user attempts to connect to phishing websites that were masquerading as cryptocurrency wallets and other related sites.
These phishing scams usual center around either cryptocurrency giveaways or exploiting the names of ICO projects to siphon funds.
Mostly from Ethereum
The report also found that the most popular cryptocurrency to use in phishing scams was Ethereum and that the popularity of Ethereum with cybercriminals increases as more funds are attracted by ICOs on the Ethereum platform.
Over the second quarter of 2018, the report stated that criminals made away with about $2.3 mln from exploiting ICOs.
The permanence of attacks targeting financial organizations reflects the fact that more and more people are using electronic money,” said Nadezhda Demidova, lead web content analyst, Kaspersky Lab. “Still, not all of them are sufficiently aware of the possible risks, so intruders are actively trying to steal sensitive information through phishing.”
Yuri Molchan
Vladislav Sopov
Dan Burgin
Alex Dovbnya