- A person lost wrapped bitcoin valued at almost $71 million in what looks to be a “address poisoning” incident.
- In a poisoning attack, the attacker uses a fake address to fool the target into sending money in the incorrect direction.
A person appears to have lost more than $71 million in wrapped bitcoin (WBTC) due to an address poisoning assault.
The Etherscan blockchain explorer shows that the victim sent 1,155 WBTC ($71.1 million) to the purported attacker through on-chain transfers.
A poisoning attack occurs when a hacker uses address mining or vanity address services to generate a wallet address that looks similar to the victim’s and then bombards the target with a large number of transactions. The victim will have transferred their money to the hacker rather than to themselves if they unintentionally duplicate the hacker’s fictitious address.
Since then, the Ethereum blockchain explorer Etherscan has flagged the hacker’s address as “phishing” and “fake”.
In order to be utilized within the Ethereum ecosystem, wrapped bitcoin is an ERC-token that is tied 1:1 to Nitcoin.
Basics of poisoning attack
When transmitting money, consumers routinely verify their wallet addresses, and attackers frequently imitate a few of the first and last numbers.
Following a security breach in August 2023, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the former CEO of Binance, clarified that these kind of assaults can be deceptively effective.
At the time, Zhao posted on social media, “The scammers are so good now they generate addresses with the same starting and ending letters, which is what most people check for when doing a crypto transfer.” To improve the UI, several wallets actually use ‘…’ to conceal the address’s middle portion. After that, the con artist sends you dust transactions using this address, causing the address to appear in your wallet.
You can now simply choose a prior transaction (sic) in your wallet and copy the address if you wish to send to the valid address. Zhao went on, “You might just copy the wrong one.” This is what transpired to a highly skilled cryptocurrency operator yesterday.
Zhao said that the August incident’s operator recognized the fraudulent activity and promptly halted the money transfer.
Disclaimer : This article was created for informational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice. An asset’s past performance does not predict its future returns. Before making an investment, please conduct your own research, as digital assets like cryptocurrencies are highly risky and volatile financial instruments.
