Phishing Attacks Target Cryptocurrency Wallets After Bitcoin Price Surges

 

Cryptocurrency

The continuing rise in Bitcoin price has resulted in an intensify in phishing attacks against the Cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) wallets in an attempt by the cyber offenders to set up bogus domains in order to confuse Bitcoin owners into giving away success onto their digital currency reserves. From the last couple of weeks, the surges in Bitcoin prices been happening. At the moment of writing this security article for our users, the value of a single BTC has surpassed 940 USD and it continues to grow minute-by-minute. Of course, an increase in the Cryptocurrency value has prompt people to invest on it. The most active investors are the Chinese users who are currently on an authentic Bitcoin buying frenzy.

Although, this upsurge has also been spotted by the criminal hackers who will not just miss the chance to stuff their wallet with valuable goods. In fact, the phishing attacks led intentionally by the cyber crooks in order to gain access to the users’ Cryptocurrency wallets that have intensified and are already being reported everyday. According to the researchers of Cisco’s Open DNS Lab, the increase in Bitcoin value consistently goes hand in hand with an extent of Cryptocurrency phishing attacks. Although, the scammers particularly target Gmail accounts to gain access to the Google Adwords.

Once gaining control over this advertising structure, the crooks can then assign specific content to be displayed when the victim enters the particular keywords onto the Google search. Typically, the keywords are the phrases such as “bitcoin wallet”, “buy bitcoins” etc. With the help of bogus links and ads, the cyber thugs then attempt to reroute the potential victims onto a fake Blockchain.info website version which is equipped with phishing functionality. You should note that Blockchain.info is a legit domain which is generally one of the biggest bitcoin wallets over the Internet.

The cyber criminals only use its renowned name in order to trick users into disclosing their Bitcoin wallet account login data which later allows the scammers to connect to the actual accounts and steal money from them. Besides, con artists may use various deceptive social engineering tactics to steal the desired data. Nevertheless, as the Cryptocurrency value increases, the ransomware creators are forced to reduce the ransom amount which is demanded for the decryption of encoded data. For instance, the initial Cerber or Locky ransomware versions used to demand 2 to 5 BTCs for the decryption tool used to unlock the files encrypted by malware. Hence, the newest variants of ransomware infection will probably have to come down to 1 or 1.5 Bitcoin in order to simply remain affordable.

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