Infected Electrum Bitcoin Wallets Now Count 152,000 Following DoS Attack

In the latest cryptocurrency news, we are reporting a new Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack which resulted in a lot of infected Electrum Bitcoin wallets. The number of infected wallets is now at 152,000 but may grow according to experts.

First reported by the anti-malware software firm Malwarebytes in an official blog post on April 29, the news show that the number of infected Electrum Bitcoin wallets has increased to 152,000 and the volume of stolen funds has surged to $4.6 million. The actual identification of the loader dubbed Trojan.BeamWinHTTP shows that the virus was downloaded along with the previously-detected Electrum DoSMiner.

Most of the infected Electrum Bitcoin wallets come from the Asia Pacific region, Brazil and Peru. The botnet which has been attacking the Electrum infrastructure is constantly growing and is reported on many best cryptocurrency news sites as an increasing threat to wallet holders.

The ongoing DoS attack was located in early April where a lot of sites reported that the Electrum network was allegedly compromised by a malicious botnet of more than 140,000 machines. The report made the altcoin news back then but was mainly aiming to steal users’ Bitcoin holdings by referring them to fake versions of the Electrum software.

As reported then, the attackers implemented their own Electrum servers which hosted compromised Electrum versions in order to fulfill the hack. This resulted in many infected Electrum Bitcoin wallets even back then – which made users’ wallets vulnerable and directed them to “update” the client with a hacked version which led to an immediate loss of funds that were contained in the old versions.

Last December (in 2018), this hack and the infected Electrum Bitcoin wallets even allowed one malicious party to steal almost 250 BTC (close to $937,000 at the time). The affected users reported trying and failing to log in to their wallets even after providing their two-factor authentication codes – which was something that Electrum did not request during the login. This is how the hackers emptied the wallet balances.

Earlier this year in April, the hardware crypto wallet manufacturer Ledger also detected malware that was targeting its desktop application with a malicious code that infected only Windows machines.