Crypto: thwarted 18,000 attacks on Phantom

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The crypto world attracts many criminals due to the ease of access to money. An interesting story in this regard is that of Phantom Wallet.

In a long article published last week on the official blog, Phantom explains what are the key points regarding the security of the wallet.

Phantom is a non-custodial crypto wallet designed to be secure, yet easy to use, and is used by the Solana community as it specifically supports this blockchain.

Shadow Wallet: Crypto Attacks Avoided

In the article, the authors highlight the transaction preview feature, which allows users to view a kind of transaction preview, in some ways similar to a firewall that identifies malicious transactions and alerts them. user before he approves them.

This protects users against phishing attacks, pharming, etc. by providing real-time alerts to users. The alerts are provided by the specialist company Blowfish.

Blowfish analyzes transactions before they are finally approved by users, looking for anything that looks suspicious.

The authors of the post claim that, so far, Phantom’s Transaction Insight has scanned over 85 million transactions, preventing over 18,000 fraudulent transactions aimed at stealing funds from users. In the past month alone, more than 3,000 users are said to have been protected in this way.

These are therefore not direct attacks on the wallet, which being a non-custodial is very difficult to attack, but directly targeting the users.

In particular, Blowfish discovered numerous transactions directed to addresses included in their blacklist, or which called the setAuthority function incorrectly, or attempted to evade controls. In some cases, actual attempts to empty the unsuspecting user’s wallet have been uncovered.

Blowfish checks for suspicious domains or websites, but also for suspicious tokens or code obfuscation attempts in smart contracts.

So, although these are not attacks against Phantom Wallet, they are still detected by Blowfish through external analysis regarding various tools and actors in the crypto industry.

Successful attacks

On the other hand, it is well known that there have been, and continue to be, many successful attacks aimed at deceptively grabbing user tokens from this and other wallets.

Indeed, it is impossible to verify all smart contracts and all recipient addresses, and often, even when verifying, it is difficult to know whether it is really a scam attempt or not.

In theory, it should be the users themselves who should try to defend themselves, as it is impossible to completely prevent them from sending funds to scammers. However, help can certainly come from services that know the industry very well and are therefore able to warn users of possible problems.

The percentage is low

It should be noted that of the 85 million transactions examined on Phantom, only 18,000 were found to be suspicious. While it’s by no means certain that there weren’t others that escaped Blowfish’s scrutiny, 18,000 out of 85 million is about 0.02%, which is a negligible percentage. This means that 99.98% of transactions were found to be non-suspicious.

To be fair, however, the big attacks that make big money for token thieves are not the ones that target small investors. These are mainly those for smart contracts or exchanges, where huge amounts of funds are deposited.

In these cases, it’s rarely phishing or social engineering, but often real hacks that exploit technical vulnerabilities.

Non-custodial wallets, such as Phantom, generally do not have these vulnerabilities, especially when their code is open-source, i.e. public and verifiable by anyone.

Therefore, hackers rarely turn their attention to non-custodial wallets, but prefer tools or platforms that might suffer from some technical vulnerability, and which can earn them huge profits if hacked.

Instead, scammers prefer to target ordinary users, exploiting not vulnerabilities in their wallets but those in their behavior, including ignorance, carelessness and superficiality.

Despite this, the overall percentage of suspicious or fraudulent transactions in the crypto industry is not particularly high, as the vast majority of transactions are correct and legitimate.

The problem is that, in some cases, huge amounts of tokens are stolen with a few fraudulent transactions, as multi-million or even billion dollar thefts in this industry are not as rare as one would like.

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