Electrum- the popular Bitcoin (BTC) wallet service reported that the service is facing another Denial-of-service (DoS) attack on its serves and in today’s cryptocurrency news we find out how that happened.
According to reports, the new attack harmed users by millions of dollars where a single user even lost about $140,000.
The news website The Next Web writes that the ongoing DoS attack was launched recently by a malicious botnet with the help of more than 130,000 machines. The goal of the attack is to steal as many bitcoins as possible by referring them to fake Electrum versions of the same software. A still-anonymous researcher writes that the DoS attack was launched about a week ago and is still lasting on a new level.
According to the article, the attackers were able to implement their own Electrum servers by hosting the compromised version of the wallet in order to successfully conduct the hack. When users synced their electrum wallet with the malicious server, they basically updated their client hacked version and ended up losing their funds that were stored on the old version.
The lead electrum developer Thomas Voegtlin stated that the company is expected to resolve the problem in the next couple of days. He emphasized that the users who are under highest threat are those who downloaded the wallet a long time ago and haven’t updated their software since.
Electrum’s website stated that the software versions that are older than 3.3 cannot connect to the public servers anymore and must be upgraded. This is a method that is used to prevent exposure to phishing texts. The website also stated that the users should not download the software from any other source but from the official website only.
The company also recommended its users to select their server manually and not to use the auto connect option. The company is still working on an improved version of the servers in order to fix the problem.
Back in 2018, a similar attack was done to the exchange where users lost more than $937,000 worth of Bitcoin. The attack was done by using a fake version of the wallet.
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