Massive Phishing Campaign Targets Over 885,000 Crypto Investors

Hackers launched a massive phishing campaign against nearly a million crypto investors in various countries. The 'Operation Asterix' campaign, detailed by cybersecurity firm Rapid7, involved stealing a database containing about 885,000 phone numbers of crypto investors from major exchanges like Kraken and Binance.

The attackers used automated scripts to cross-check phone numbers at scale against databases of major exchanges, with a high hit rate. In the German sample, the match rate was 13.6%, with over 43,000 real crypto investors identified.

Victims received calls from people posing as support staff or emails spoofing companies such as Crypto.com. The goal was to push users to a phishing site or get them to install a fake app closely imitating Ledger, Trezor, or Exodus to steal their seed phrases.