2.3 million Bitcoin addresses are being monitored by clipboard hijackers who take advantage of the complexity of wallet addresses to dupe users.
Once a user copies a wallet address to the clipboard, the hackers can replace it with their own address before the user pastes it elsewhere. Because of this, a user ends up sending coins to an unintended address under the pretense of a legitimate transaction.
This sort of malware belongs to the “clipboard hijackers” category, which infects Windows clipboard if it manages to gain access to a computer. Bleeping Computer said that apart from double-checking the address, users can protect themselves from this sort of attack by having an updated antivirus.
Crypto-hijacking incidents and other hacking activities have seen a rise in this industry with more high-profile heists breaking out. Last month, two South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges were hit by hackers where the culprits took a collective bounty of $68.5 million.
Lawrence Abrahams, a computer forensics and creator of BleepingComputer wrote at the weekend.
“This type of malware, called CryptoCurrency Clipboard Hijackers, works by monitoring the Windows clipboard for cryptocurrency addresses, and if one is detected, will swap it out with an address that they control,”
Keeping up-to-date antivirus software running constitutes users’ main defence against the problem, along with double-checking the destination Bitcoin address of a transaction if this has been entered using a copy-paste function.
Some hardware wallets such as TREZOR additionally force users to double-check addresses for manipulations whenever one is generated.
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