Ethereum address poisoning attacks stole $740,000 after Fusaka
The latest recorded network activity on Ethereum can be linked to a wave of address poisoning attacks that have been taking advantage of low gas fees since December, security researcher Andrey Sergenkov said.
Cointelegraph reported on Friday that network activity has doubled to 8 million addresses in a month, with daily transactions reaching a peak of 2.9 million.
In the year The week starting January 12 saw 2.7 million new addresses, 170% higher than normal values, and daily transactions reached more than 2.5 million, Sergenkov said.
But Sergenkov said the outage could be a form of mass spam attack known as “address poisoning,” which became more economical after December's Fusaka Ethereum network upgrade cut transaction fees.
In the weeks following the update in early December, network charges dropped more than 60%.
“Address poisoning has become disproportionately attractive to attackers,” the researcher said. He said.
$740,000 was lost in an address poisoning attack
Address poisoning involves fraudsters sending small transactions from legitimate-looking wallet addresses, tricking users into copying the wrong address when making a transaction.
The scammers first send a small amount of money, usually a stable coin, to a “dust dealer” address.
Sergenkov says he was able to find the addresses of potential dust distributors by looking at the number of wallets that received less than a dollar as the first stablecoin transaction.
RELATED: Bulletproof Ethereum Is Gaining Value With User Metrics
He then looked at only those who sent more than 10,000 addresses to identify which of these were “dust distributor” addresses.
“These poison addresses spread dust to millions of victims, creating false entries in transaction history.”
Some of the top “dusters” have been sent to more than 400,000 recipients, and more than $740,000 has been stolen from 116 victims this way, he said.
Magazine: Indians slam Pudgy Penguin, former digital yuan boss over crypto scandal: Asia Express
