BTC Wires: According to reports by the Kaspersky Labs, hackers
BTC Wires: According to reports by the Kaspersky Labs, hackers and cybercriminals have managed to pocket about $2.3 million through phishing during the second quarter of this year and the target they’ve chosen most commonly have been associated with Ethereum wallets. By swindling users into believing they were investing their assets in trustworthy ICOs, the illegal profiteers have raked in a whopping sum. Kaspersky’s Spam and Phishing Report revealed that the online criminals trapped potential crypto investors by luring them using fake ICO sites.
Most of the sites that have been used for the fraud are startups that run on Ethereum, and were meant for fundraising for further development of their platforms.
Besides planting false crowdfunding links into emails sent from their websites, the swindlers made use of a host of tricks to make an investor transfer crypto assets to their Ethereum wallets of their own accord. As a result, the conned investors end up transfering money to the tricksters under the impression that they’re investing in an ICO.
Kaspersky revealed that the criminals continued to use the names of new ICOs being launched to take money from investors who wish to get early access to the new crypto coin on offer. Phishing sites appear as pop up windows before original websites and that is what happened in the recent phishing case where Experty was mimicked by the fraudsters convincingly, conning several investors out of a substantial amount of assets.
A very popular ICO launched by Telegram had also received the criminals’ attention causing over a dozen fake websites to mushroom all over the internet. By the time the actual presale of the Telegram ICO ended, the hackers conned investors into giving them an amount almost equivalent to that raised by the original site.
Till now, Kaspersky has successfully checked traditional phishing efforts, numbering almost 58000, with its antiphishing software. As chief expert of the company, Alexander Gostev noted, a mere two thousand attacks last year had caused the ICO market to lose out more than $300 million to swindlers.
The study also focused on how even authentic-looking HTTPS certification can lead to malicious pages, since they are now so easily available and accessible for everyone. However, it went on to note that soon, browsers like Chrome will be marking unencrypted websites as “not secure”, aiding the users somewhat in deciding where they should put in their personal information.