Anything related to the cryptocurrency industry seems to be the target of illicit hackers at the moment.
After the recent attack on the DeFi protocol dForce, which led to a loss of 25 million in crypto, now Google was taking matters in its hands to remove to protect the integrity of crypto wallet users.
According to reports, Google has removed a total of 49 extensions for the Web Store which apparently mimicking certain digital asset wallets.
Harry Denley, Director of Security at the MyCrypto platform was the first to identify these 49 extensions that contained malicious code and stole crypto-wallet private keys, mnemonic phrases, and other confidential user information.
Denley stated that the 49 extensions could be of Russian origin, put forward by one person or collective group. He stated,
“Whilst the extensions are all function the same, the branding is different depending on the user they are targeting.”
All the identified extension operated with similar functionality to the actual wallets but any users entering during the configuration step is directly sent to the attacker’s server of an anonymous Google Form.
According to the Researcher, the crypto wallet apps that were mimicked by these extensions included the likes of Ledger, Trezor, Jaxx, Electrum, MyEthereWallet, MetaMask, Exodus and KeepKey.
The report further mentioned that Denley is now persuading the users to file a complaint on the CryptoScamDB if any of their chrome extensions leads to future wallet hack or lost funds.
Crypto Chrome Scam emulating Ledger
The current incident isn’t the first detection of a fraudulent extension. Two weeks ago, an illicit Ledger Chrome extension was reported to have stolen close to $2.5 million in digital assets.
The fake browser went out as the extended support for popular hardware wallet manufacturer of Ledger, and users were asked to put down their 24-word seed, which facilitated as a gateway between hackers and the respective user’s wallet contents.
The application managed to take siphon out around $2.5 million out of user’s wallets without detection but a Reddit user went public and suggested that they had lost close to $2,500 in XRP due to the malicious application. The user stated,
“I have watched our xrp transfer from our account to an account that is currently holding over $2.5 million in xrp. This is clearly a large operation.”
A group of Researchers at XRPlorer Forensics had also indicated that a mirror version of Ledger has stolen 200,000 XRP in March.
