Airdrop Craze Leads to Trouble! Phishing Attacks on Discord Skyrocketed in the Past Six Months, with Over 90% of Victims Being Children Under 18?

According to The Block, citing data from PeckShield and Dune Analytics, the use of token stealing code has surged recently. Attackers are utilizing social media platforms like Discord for phishing schemes, resulting in approximately 32,000 wallets losing assets over a span of 9 months, with a total loss of $73 million. The victims are predominantly young individuals, with as many as 95% being children under the age of 18.

Multiple Discord Servers, Including Orbiter Finance, Recently Hacked

Cryptotimes reported that the Discord administrator of Orbiter Finance was interviewed by an imposter posing as a cryptocurrency media journalist on June 1st and was asked to fill out a form. However, the malicious program within the form froze the administrator's control over their Discord and restricted members from sending messages.

Source: Scam Sniffer

The Block reported that there has been a surge in incidents of official accounts or servers of cryptocurrency communities on Discord and Twitter being hacked recently, including Pika Protocol, OpenAI CTO, and Orbiter Finance. Over the past year and a half, 900 Discord servers have been compromised due to phishing attacks, with the number gradually increasing over the past three months.

Attackers have been posting fake airdrop announcements as administrators, linking to deployed phishing websites, and have stolen about $213,000 worth of NFTs and tokens to date.

95% of Cyberattack Victims Are Children Under 18

Plum, a researcher from the OpenSea security team, pointed out that children's addiction to games and their security need attention:

Rise of Malware Behind the Attacks

Scam Sniffer, a platform for collecting scam information, stated that recent phishing incidents are related to a malware program. The malicious program named Pink Drainer has attacked 7 Discord servers in the past month, resulting in approximately 1,932 wallet assets lost and $3 million in damages.

The attacks have spread across networks such as ETH, BSC, Arbitrum, Polygon, and are linked to multiple incidents involving Starknet, Pika Protocol, Orbiter Finance, OpenAI CTO, among others.

Prior to this, another attack program called Venom Drainer targeted projects that might conduct airdrops, creating over 540 counterfeit phishing websites, resulting in over $27 million in losses.