According to recent reports, the official website of the meme coin Pepe was attacked from the front end. The cybersecurity company Blockaid discovered the breach at an early stage and sent a notification to the community that malicious code from the Inferno Drainer toolkit had been injected into the site.
The Inferno Drainer suite is a set of fraudulent tools typically used by attackers, including phishing website templates, wallet draining programs, and social engineering tools.
It is known that the malware from the Inferno Drainer toolkit used by hackers redirects visitors to phishing pages ultimately intended for stealing critical data, such as wallet credentials, approvals for unauthorized transactions, and theft of assets like tokens, NFTs, and other valuables.
*********
“The Blockaiddent system fronts an attack on Pepe. The site contains Inferno Drainer code,”
— reported the cybersecurity company on Thursday.
**********
The price of Pepe remains low
The price of PEPE did not immediately react to the hack, and it is quite possible that the exploit has not yet been factored into the price, as the meme coin has risen by about 0.87% over the last 24 hours. In the long term, it has fallen by more than 77% over the past 12 months.
The incident highlights the need for vigilance among cryptocurrency users, as it is the best defense against phishing and other cyber threats. Users are also strongly advised to avoid using this site until the issue is resolved.
According to Blockaid, last year the number of hackers using Inferno Drainer increased almost threefold, although the team behind it claimed that they would shut down this fraudulent service in 2023.
**********
“At the beginning of the year, we saw about 800 new malicious decentralized applications Inferno Drainer per week. Now that number has tripled to 2400 per week,”
— said Oz Tamir, a former Blockaid engineer, in an interview in August 2024.
*********
Since then, the Inferno Drainer group and its toolkit have been linked to several scams involving social engineering, exploits on social media, and cryptocurrency theft using malware, including the hacking of the BNB X page in October.
