The total volume of phishing attacks across all industries in the first half of 2021 grew by 22% year-on-year. But attacks on cryptocurrency exchanges have increased tenfold.
According to a PhishLabs report, a significant proportion of phishing attacks take place using social media. At the same time, more than half of all attacks on cryptocurrency companies via social networks (54.7%) involve the use of the brand, the names of the company’s managers and employees.
“Attackers continue to use phishing to steal sensitive information and are developing more sophisticated methods to take advantage of the rapid growth of the cryptocurrency sector,” said John LaCour, founder and CTO of PhishLabs.
Analysts have calculated that the number of phishing attacks on cryptocurrency exchanges this year has grown by an average of 13% every month. At the same time, the researchers expect that the cryptocurrency industry “will continue to be subjected to aggressive attacks via social networks.”
“As the cryptocurrency markets mature, there are hacker approaches to compromising exchanges, owners of cryptoassets, and other participants in the cryptocurrency financial ecosystem,” LaCourt said.
According to him, the willingness of financial institutions to offer their clients tools for investing in cryptocurrencies, the recent listing of Coinbase on the Nasdaq and the record-high rise in the price of BTC in the second quarter have all led to increased attention to the industry. Therefore, it is logical that “hackers come to any place where the money goes,” he said.
“With the price of BTC surpassing $ 45,000 again and the entire cryptocurrency market worth nearly $ 2 trillion today, we expect hackers to continue to pay more attention to this industry in Q3,” LaCourt said.
At the same time, researchers are seeing positive trends, including the ability of governments to recover payments from ransomware, as was the case with Colonial Pipeline, as well as the willingness of industry participants to team up to improve security. The latest trend, LaCourt said, could be seen during the recent attack on the Poly Network, where exchanges and stablecoin issuers agreed to refuse to process transactions coming from hacker addresses.
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