In 2017 with abductions faced many wealthy firms. Unknown attackers used a bug in a contract with a multi-signature Parity, a wallet for cryptographic Ethereum, which allowed them to steal someone else’s money. In pockets of criminals there were 153 thousand ETH, that is about 30 million dollars. Attackers used tarting – an attack on specific wallets, in which the developers made mistakes.
Another hacker has broken the South Korean Bitcoin Exchange Bithumb, the largest exchange of Bitcoin in the country and the fourth largest exchange platform in the world. Thus, they took from the accounts of bitcoin clients for several billion South Korean waves.
Attacks require a good knowledge hacker to reverse engineer and build financial software. Typically, malware is caused by viruses. Such viruses can be divided into two types:
-
Bitcoin Miner
They infect the system and start extracting “crypt” on an infected computer without the owner’s knowledge.
Group-IB reports that the number of offers of hacker software for hidden mining has increased fivefold in the last six months. Kaspersky Lab also adds that 2.2 million computers were attacked by software miners around the world during the same period.
-
Stealer
They steal passwords from wallets. It also includes primitive viruses that replace the address of the sender in the buffer of exchange.
This year, it was predicted that the losses from hacker attacks reached a trillion. Even if we choose that hackers earn 40% of this amount. That 400 billion dollars is the annual turnover of cybercrime.
Popularity also gathers “affiliate programs” for extracting cryptic currency directly in the user’s browser. Miner puts every second affiliate program, the Install (PPI). Chrome Safe Browsing extensions and a number of other services, such as Adblock or Ghostery, can track and block such “Meiner.”
Attackers are also looking for disadvantages in smart contracts for popular ICO projects. To do this, they use phishing – they replace ICO sites by placing code clones on github, and sometimes they replace wallets to raise funds.