The addition of a new feature to the Ethereum Create2 blockchain led to the theft of a large amount of money, $60 million.
People who were involved in fraud used Create2 to get around the Ethereum platform's security measures, which let them find another way to make money.
By using the Create2 function in the Ethereum blockchain, attackers have been able to get around the security systems of cryptocurrency wallets. A report from the Scam Sniffer company says that this method has been used to steal $60 million worth of cryptocurrency from about 99,000 users in the last six months. In some cases, people lost as much as $1.6 million in money.
Create2 is a feature that was added in the Constantinople update that lets you make smart contracts on the blockchain. Notably, Create2 lets you figure out contract addresses ahead of time, before they are sent out. However, the above function has created new security holes in Ethereum, even though it works correctly.
One of the main ways that abuse is done is by making up new contract addresses that have never been used for any weird transactions before. Adversaries use misleading methods to get people who aren't paying attention to approve bad transactions, which then send money to addresses they choose. Because they took part in a dishonest transfer agreement, one of the people involved in the incident lost $927,000 in GMX cryptocurrency.
Another method, called "address poisoning," involves making a bunch of different addresses and then finding the ones that look like the real addresses of the people being targeted. As a result, people send money to fake companies by accident because they think they are sending money to familiar places. Since August 2023, there have been 11 confirmed cases of people losing about $3 million through this method.
Attacks often went unnoticed, but some did get people's attention. The MetaMask service warned people not to use recently created addresses that look a lot like the addresses of people who have been scammed during recent transactions. To give an example, the person in charge of Binance accidentally sent $20 million to people who were committing fraud. But the operator quickly realized what had gone wrong and then suspended the recipient's account.
Researchers stress that using similar cryptocurrency addresses is similar to how malicious software, like the Laplas Clipper, uses the clipboard for its own purposes. For this reason, experts strongly advise users to be very careful and check recipient addresses very carefully when making cryptocurrency transactions. This will lower the risk of falling for scams.
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