Bug causes Google to list malicious websites in searches for ‘Coinmarketcap’

Binance‘s CEO Changpeng Zhao tweeted to warn that Google displays phishing websites when users search for CoinMarket Cap.

Zhao said users who try to add smart contract addresses to their MetaMask wallets are the ones that get most affected by this error.

Google displays phishing sites when users search CMC. This affects users adding smart contract addresses to MetaMask using these phishing sites. We are trying to contact Google for this, and in the meantime alerting users about this through social channels. pic.twitter.com/3q4860Jl4H

— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) October 27, 2022

According to Zhao, the Binance security team detected the problem and is trying to reach out to Google to fix the issue. At the time of writing, Google hasn’t returned or made any changes.

Phishing attacks

The number of hacks, phishing attacks, and scams increases together with the expansion of the crypto space.

A recent report from Immunefi revealed that the Web3 space lost over $428 million to hacks and scams in the third quarter of 2022. A total of 39 incidents were included in the report, which didn’t include phishing attacks. But they have been growing in number, effect, and sophistication. The community also noticed their spread as they became the newest form of high-tech fraud.

Phishing attacks drew considerable attention in February when OpenSea lost around $2 million worth of NFTs to a phishing attack. Since then, numerous other projects have also lost millions to phishing attackers.

In May, an attacker phished $1.5 million worth of NFTs from Moonbirds. In July, leading decentralized exchange Uniswap’s V3 LPs suffered another phishing attack and lost over $4.7 million.

Most recently, leading exchange platform FTX’s users were targets of a phishing attack and lost over $6 million. While responding to the attack, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried published a thread on Twitter and acknowledged the stat phishing scams had come. He said:

“Usually, phishing looks like an email, and it has a bad attachment or something.

In crypto, the scams have gotten sophisticated.

For instance–we have a team of people who work to make sure fake FTX clones don’t gain prominence.”