A crypto founder foiled an “extremely intense” social engineering scam attempt that could have cost him more than $125 million worth of Ethereum (ETH). This effort shows that hackers are becoming more sophisticated and “super smart”.
Social engineering is a method used by cybercriminals to gain someone’s trust, often by manipulating, to steal sensitive information or to induce them to take actions that “they would not do otherwise.” Heather Morgan may have stolen $4.5 billion from Bitfinex in this way.
Thomsg.eth is the pseudonymous founder of Arrow, an early-stage DAO working to create a decentralized air transportation system. on sunday he Detailed How he was almost socially engineered to give up all his ETH.
The founder spoke of the widespread efforts employed by scammers to try to steal his money, including working for his project and engaging in discussions with several people over a period of two weeks.
The scam only failed because ThomasG decided to use a new Ethereum address, not its primary address, when demonstrating a favor to the hackers involving non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Writing on Twitter, the Arrow founder said:
For the past two weeks, I have been targeted in an extremely intense social engineering scam that cost me almost all my ETH. I’m so lucky I didn’t finish it.
Social engineering: Scammers volunteer at Arrow to gain trust
Thomas.eth said a user named Hexine reached out to him on Discord and offered to help “with 3D design and animation” for free. He compelled and assigned her some tasks. Hexine’s work is spectacular, and Thomasg is “impressed” by the designer’s dedication to the project.
Gained trust, Hexine soon puts the founder of Arrow DAO in contact with a ‘proven’ industry connection, Linh, who initiates the scandal. Thomasg.eth agrees to have Linh on board as an advisor.
She later convinced Thomas to test the hostage service of an NFT project she was leading – Space Falcon, a popular gaming project on Solana, but whose domain name was corrupted for Linh fraud purposes. Lin sends an NFT to his Ethereum address. Explaining, Thomasg said:
“Now here is where I got incredibly lucky. Since this is a new project, I decided to move NFTs to a new ETH address before going through the staking process – just in case they go down the road or something. exploit. The bet is on and I am earning a reward for that.”
But Linh prompts him to make another NFT bet, this time from his main account. That’s when he “finally realized something unfinished was going on.”
“So I pull up Etherscan for the new address where I put the first NFT and my blood goes ice f***ing cold,” Thomasg says. “The astonishment I took for granted was not [Space Falcon’s] Armstrong eth, rather awe of awe. At my main address, almost all of my ETH is sitting in Aave.”
fake smart contract
Thomsg.eth further investigated the contract and found that the smart contract contained a command where all aWETH could be extracted at any time by hackers.
While the first active stake could only have resulted in the theft of staking rewards, an attack on his main address, which at the time contained about $125 million in aWETH, would have completely emptied the account.
It is likely that the perpetrators were attracted to the fat balance in the address of Thomseg, which uses the Ethereum Name Service (ENS). The service allows users to take advantage of names as addresses instead of the alphanumeric characters that make up a regular ETH address. The hackers must have researched it very thoroughly before starting the engagement.
thomasg.eth acknowledged:
“Perhaps my biggest mistake with all of this was keeping all my funds in the same wallet as my ENS. Security through obscurity would have kept me from being a target in the first place.”
The scammers have since erased their footprints on Discord, but Thomsag now believes he hired a graphic designer to do the work of Hexine while the two focused on stealing from him.
“They also created custom contracts and front-ends that are completely specific to this scam,” he said. “These guys were incredibly well funded and super smart.”