Study: BTC was stolen from Electrum users in two years $24.2 million

ZDNet has conducted a study of BTC theft from Electrum wallet users over the past two years by tracking the withdrawal addresses of stolen BTC.

The first case of an attack on Electurm users during the monitoring period was recorded in December 2018 of the year. Attackers Used the architecture of the wallet, which allows any user to launch his own Electrumx server. They modified with server, so that he gives out to any user, connected to the server, Message about the required update.

The update with the malicious code was located on the GitHub service, or third -party servers. When an inattentive user, not noticing, What downloads an update from a third -party server, Installed it, Attackers gained access to the Bitcoins of the victim.

After the first case, there were many such attacks, Moreover, the latter was recorded in September 2020 of the year. According to journalists, On wallets, belonging to hackers, now lies 1 980 btc, and yet 202 BTC was displayed in 2018 year. In this way, At the current course, attackers in total were able to steal bitcoins on $24 million.

After the attack was discovered, the developers tried to block it-the black lists system appeared in Electrumx servers and the HTML messages showed user show. However, Users with old verses of wallets periodically appear, who can connect to the servers of attackers.

Recently, At the end of August, The user Electrum has lost
1 400 BTC after loading the old version of the wallet, connected to malicious servers. His mistake “provided” to the hackers more than half of all bitcoins stolen on this vulnerability.

Source