Crypto Phishing Attacks Increased 40% in 2022, Kaspersky Says

Russian cybersecurity and anti-virus provider Kaspersky said that the crypto phishing attacks in 2022 saw an increase of 40%, recording 5,040,520 crypto phishing attacks in the year, compared with 3,596,437 in the previous year.

In a press release, Kaspersky attributed this hike to the damage which the crypto market witnessed the last year without giving no predictions about whether this trend would continue or not, saying it depends on the user’s trust in the crypto industry.

The cybersecurity firm recalled the results of a 2022 survey, which is correlated to these data. One out of seven respondents confessed to being affected by cryptocurrency phishing.

Most crypto scams are being done in a traditional way, such as giveaway scams or fake wallet phishing pages but Kaspersky identified a new way of scamming which is based on a PDF file containing a link to a fake mining platform, through which the scammer asks the user to fill his personal information, including the card or account number, and pay a commission.

In this regard, Olga Svistunova, a security expert at Kaspersky, said: “Despite some problems that have occurred in the cryptocurrency market over the past six months, in the minds of many people, crypto still remains a symbol of getting rich quickly with minimal effort. Therefore, the flow of scammers parasitizing in this field does not dry out. In order to lure victims into their networks, these scammers continue to come up with new and more interesting stories.”

Kaspersky also added that current phishing crypto attacks became more challenging and increasingly complicated as the cybercriminals started using social engineering techniques to access users’ wallets and steal their funds. This happened with hardware digital asset wallet provider, Trezor, and Arbitrum’s official Discord server in February and March, respectively, this year.