Incident Overview
Hackers diverted visitors of MyEtherWallet.com, accessing user accounts and stealing approximately 215 ether.
MyEtherWallet warned users on Reddit and Twitter as soon as the hack was identified. But, this left a couple of hours where users of the wallet attempting to visit the MyEtherWallet.com website were redirected to a “spoof” or phishing site controlled by the hackers.
The hack employed the “decade-old” technique of redirecting Domain Name Servers (DNS) rather than a hack, or weakness in, MyEtherWallet.
It was quickly identified that over 150k worth of ETH had been stolen in the DNS hack with 179 transactions totaling 216.06 ETH sent to:
https://etherscan.io/address/0x1d50588c…120d29
Incident Report
Protocol Information
What the Attacker Needed to Succeed
Understanding the prerequisites for this type of attack helps auditors identify protocols that are most at risk and helps developers build better defenses.
What Auditors Should Check
If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to MyEtherWallet, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (April 2018).
- Verify all logic paths related to Access Control are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Access Control Attacks attack class for patterns
- Review privileged functions (owner, admin, governance) for potential abuse vectors - centralization risks should be documented and bounded with timelocks or multi-sigs
Master these auditing techniques with hands-on labs and real exploit scenarios in the Smart Contract Hacking course.
Free TrialRelated Attack Classes
The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:
Sources & References
Learn to Prevent the Next MyEtherWallet
The MyEtherWallet hack is one of many attacks that skilled auditors are trained to detect before deployment. Master real exploit patterns and defense techniques with hands-on Web3 security training.