Cardano Among Top Targets of Phishing Attacks Ahead of Vasil Fork

While the Cardano community is counting down the days to the protocol’s ‘Vasil’ update, the project itself remains one of the most enticing targets for phishing attacks.  

Cardano ranks 3rd among the most targeted cryptocurrency projects in the past three months, as revealed by recent data from an Atlas VPN survey. According to information provided by a URL scanner tool, the crypto protocol has suffered 191 phishing attacks since the end of March. 

Phishing is a common form of cyber attack in which fraudsters impersonate authentic brands and businesses in order to steal sensitive data from unsuspecting victims, or to install malware on their devices.

Due to human susceptibility to manipulation, phishing remains one of the most common techniques employed in social engineering and cyber attacks. Last year alone, phishing attacks accounted for around 90% of data breaches.

Crypto Projects Are Common Targets

Phishing is also one of the main causes for losses in the crypto world, as scammers target a wide range of cryptocurrency projects, including crypto exchanges and NFT marketplaces.

The survey revealed that crypto fintech Blockchain.com was the most targeted project by scammers, with more than 662 attacks directed towards them during the second quarter. 

Crypto investing app Luno recorded less than half as many attacks, suffering 277 over the same time period. Despite that, it still ranked second in terms of the most targeted crypto projects. 

On the other hand, trading platforms like Poloniex, Bittrex and Binance registered significantly lower numbers of phishing attacks, each recording between 59 and 72 phishing attempts. Solana’s leading NFT marketplace Magic Eden witnessed a similar range of assaults, with 67 attempts over the period.

Scammers employ a variety of tactics to perform these attacks. Malicious crypto and NFT airdrops, legit-looking emails, websites, browser extensions, and hacked social media accounts have all been utilized to fool unsuspecting victims into sharing their private keys or other credentials.

As part of the range of social engineering scams, phishing remains a persistent problem in the crypto space. In 11 of the past 12 months, the decentralized finance sector alone recorded more than $12 billion in losses to social engineering and phishing attacks—almost double those suffered in 2020.

High Density Ahead of Major Events

Last summer, the founder of Cardano, Charles Hoskinson notified the community of an upcoming surge in Cardano-related scams and phishing attacks. “Anytime you see major events coming and, large-scale price appreciation and a lot of volatility, you always will see an enormous increase in scams,” Hoskinson said at the time.

“We will never ask you for your keywords, private keys and we will never ever ask you to install some monitoring software on your computer to be able to help you,” he added. 

Cardano plans to implement the highly anticipated Vasil hard fork by the end of July. The protocol upgrade is expected to significantly increase the performance and capabilities of the Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchain platform.