Tweet by Cyvers Alerts
Primary Source ↗Incident Details
An Ethereum wallet was apparently drained of 1,155 wrapped bitcoin (~$72.7 million) when they transferred it to a malicious address that had been operating an address poisoning scheme.Address poisoning is a scam tactic that takes advantage of crypto traders’ tendencies to copy and paste wallet addresses from their transaction histories, since the addresses are long strings of characters that are not practical to type from memory. By creating a new wallet address with identical start and/or ending character strings to addresses used by the victim, and spamming the victim with transactions from that similar address, scammers are sometimes able to get victims to erroneously copy the spoofed address for future transfers.That’s what appears to have happened in this case, when a victim transferred 1,155 wrapped bitcoin — tokens pegged to the bitcoin price meant for use on the Ethereum blockchain — to the malicious address.The victim and the exploiter later reached an agreement for the return of most of the funds, with the exploiter keeping $7.2 million as a “bounty”.
Total loss estimated at $7,200,000.
Technical Details
- Initial Attack Vector
- Address poisoning attack
- Vendor / Product
- 0x1E227 address poisoning
Timeline
- 2024-05-03 Breach occurred
- 2024-05-03 Publicly disclosed