Hacks, always hacks – Web3 hackers and scammers are doubling their ingenuity. Indeed, the latter explore the slightest flaw to extract their precious cryptocurrencies to their victims. The crypto platform Gate.io paid the price following a phishing campaign.
Gate.io victim of a phishing campaign
With over $400 million in daily volume, Gate.io is the fifth largest cryptocurrency exchange. Faced with such success, it turns out to be a prime target for scammers.
Thus, on October 22, the company PeckShield alerted Gate.io that its Twitter account had been compromised. Indeed, the Twitter account @gate_io with 1.1 million subscribers has published a surprising tweet.
In his tweet, the account announces a giveaway campaign with the key 500,000 USDT. Unsurprisingly, the tweet is accompanied by a link to a URL that may belong to Gate.io.
However, the address has a obvious typowith a cedilla on the “a” of Gate.
In addition, the attacker also modified the website present in Gate.io’s Twitter biography.
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What is a phishing attack?
You will no doubt have understood that this is a lien de type phishing. As always in the case of phishing attacks, the link refers to a website that looks like the official website of the trading platform.
However, this fake site aims to steal your credentials to the platform to steal your funds. In some cases, these attacks push you to connect your wallet to a fraudulent site to steal NFTs and cryptocurrencies.
This type of attack has become extremely prevalent in the crypto ecosystem over the past few months. In practice, this type of attack takes place in two stages.
First, the attackers find a way to take over a social media account with a lot of followers. Once the account is in their possession, they can launch the phishing campaign by massively publishing links to fake giveaways, airdrops or even whitelists.
Obviously, there are methods to avoid falling into this type of scam:
- If the offer turns out to be too good, chances are it’s a scam;
- It is essential to always verify the authenticity of the links on which you click.
However, spoofing social media accounts is not the only entry point for these scammers. Thus, other methods have been observed, such as that of fraudulent NFT airdrops.
Another one bites the dust.. Another giant of the crypto ecosystem bites the dust. Avoid leverage for a while and you’ll be fine. Register without delay on the FTX reference crypto exchange platform. In addition, you benefit from a lifetime reduction on your trading fees (commercial link, see conditions on official website).
