Hardware Wallet Provider Trezor Targeted in Phishing Attack
A malicious actor pretending to be Trezor sent a false email requesting victims to update their software and change their wallet PIN
Blockworks exclusive art by axel Rangel
key takeaways
- Trezor said Saturday its newsletter had been breached by an “insider targeting crypto companies”
- The domain linked to the breach, ending in the extension .us, has since been taken down, the provider said
Cryptocurrency hardware wallet provider Trezor said Saturday it was investigating a data breach of its opt-in newsletter hosted on marketing platform MailChimp.
A scam email warning of a breach began circulating last week, according to affected users. Trezor then sent a warning via Twitter asking its users not to open emails originating from the phishing domain “[email protected].”
Users took to social media to warn against the scam email impersonating Trezor and its security team, which prompted victims to download the “latest version of Trezor Suite” and change their wallet PIN.
The provider has since managed to take down multiple phishing domains targeting users including Trezor.us, according to a follow-up tweet on Sunday.
“MailChimp has confirmed that their service has been compromised by an insider targeting crypto companies,” Trezor said. “We have managed to take the phishing domain offline. We are trying to determine how many email addresses have been affected.”
The company also said it would not communicate via its newsletter until the situation is resolved.
Questions have been raised by the community, wondering why the provider had not already registered top-level domains (TLD) including extensions .us, .net, and .com to prevent such attacks.
Still, some argue hackers could easily circumvent TLD registration by imitating the domain name and changing a single character, such as “Trez0r,” to dupe victims.
Trezor did not immediately respond to Blockworks’ request for comment.
This type of attack does not represent a threat to the cryptographic security of the hardware wallet, nor is it the first example of a crypto wallet firm being targeted. Rival hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger suffered a data leak of its marketing database in July 2020, which resulted in its users being the target of phishing attacks and other forms of fraud.
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