Ethereum heist: New phishing scam sees hackers rake in over $15,000 in just two hours

A new Ethereum phishing campaign, targeting users of the online Ethereum wallet website Myethereumwallet.com, has been uncovered. The scam saw hackers make away with over $15,000 (£11,308) in just two hours.

According to security researcher Wesley Neelen, who identified the campaign when he received a phishing email from the cybercriminals, the scam involved hackers sending out phishing emails purporting to be from the Myetherwallet.com website. The email was designed to trick victims into clicking on malicious links that would redirect them to a fake version of the website. The victims would then be prompted into divulging their account passwords, which the hackers would later use to transfer out all the coins in the victims' wallet.

Although the fake Myetherwallet.com site was designed to look similar to the legitimate site, keen observers would likely notice that the fake site contained a small comma beneath the "t" in the site's address. According to Neelen, the cybercriminals used a Unicode trick that allowed them to register domains that looked like Latin characters. This ploy in turn, allowed the hackers to create fake sites that can convincingly look like legitimate sites to unsuspecting users.

According to Neelen, some people have unfortunately already fallen victim to the scam. Neelen and his colleague Rik van Duijn, discovered a log file that contained a list of all the wallets stolen by the hackers. The security experts determined that the cybercriminals had stolen a total of $15,875.65 in Ethereum and had then proceeded to transfer the stolen coins to three different wallets operated by the hackers.

Ethereum's growing popularity has made it an attractive target for cybercriminals. So far, there have been around four incidents involving hackers stealing millions of dollars worth of ether from various wallets. Oddly, in one such Ethereum heist, a hacker who stole nearly $7m of Ethereum from CoinDash later returned around $3m in stolen funds, sparking further mystery about the heist.