Massive $50 Million Bitcoin Phishing Scam Uncovered by Cisco

Cryptocurrency theft is condign a serious problem worldwide as the industry continues to grapple with issues of integrity, stability and regulation, even every bit the underlying Blockchain engineering becomes increasingly mainstream, seemingly, with every passing day. After Japanese commutation business firm Coincheck was hit by a massive cryptocurrency heist final month, a written report published by Cisco's Talos cyber-security team now suggests that users of pop online digital wallet, Blockchain.info, have as well been hitting past a phishing scam amounting to a whopping $50 1000000.

Talos obviously discovered the scheme in February 2017, when it noticed that phony sites were attracting "over 200,000 client queries" per hr. The researchers also describe the scam as "unique", because it leveraged the power of Google AdWords to carry out the heist. According to Talos and the Ukranian cyber law, Google AdWords displayed fraudulent ads from an Ukrainian cyber-crime group called 'Coinhoarder' at the summit of search pages for users who Googled 'blockchain' or 'bitcoin wallets'.

According to the researchers, the ads contained "gateway phishing links … that would redirect to a lander page (when clicked on) and serve phishing content in the native language of the geographic region of the victim's IP address". As can be seen above, the cyber-criminals used domain names like, 'blockchien[.]info' or 'block-clain[.]info' that closely resemble the name of the genuine website, but were allegedly setup by Coinhoarder. Over time, the operation became more sophisticated, with the criminals using bogus SSL certificates alongside various techniques, such as 'typosquatting', 'brand spoofing', and 'homograph attacks'.

After managing to rails down the wallet addresses of the scammers, the researchers believe that the group has been going on near their merry ways since "at least 2015". Co-ordinate to the researchers, hackers allegedly stole $10 meg worth of Bitcoin from September 2017 to December 2017, as can be seen in the screenshot below.

While Google is yet to comment officially on this upshot, crypto-phishing scams are condign increasingly common on a number of different platforms, not but Google. Only recently, Twitter expunged a lot of accounts believed to be associated with such scamsters who were impersonating well-known leaders of the cryptocurrency industry, like Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin and Litecoin creator Charlie Lee.

Source: https://beebom.com/50-million-bitcoin-phishing-scam-uncovered-by-cisco/

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