What happened?

This is an alert to anybody that frequents r/Bitcoin. As you may have heard already a certain individual/account is trying to phish BTC by asking for a user’s email address along with their Bitcoins. The accounts seem to be sending PMs to users on r/Bitcoin that look something like the following:

Hello, I am one of the many bitcoin millionaires, so i decided to send between 0.1 and 0.15 BTC per person that i consider valuable for the bitcoin community (for improvement and popularization). So you are one of them. I only need your email and bitcoin address. Later you will be contacted on email about the correct amount you will get. Example: email:demo@demo.com address: 1AD8giCqAWK3q6KzatQkDz7k62NipNo7qm Regards

It looks like the person is acting nice and wants to give away some Bitcoin’s, if an individual wanted to give away Bitcoin’s he would do that by only asking for the public Bitcoin address and would not need an email account. In this case the attacker is trying to link an email account with a Bitcoin address in order to try some hacking attempts.

Furthermore, if an individual on reddit wanted to give away Bitcoins he could simply use changetip. So essentially you do not even need to give an address to donate Bitcoins.

some individuals already sent their email with their Bitcoin address to the attacker. If you have done so then make sure you move your coins to a new address not associated with the email you provided. If your coins are on a Coinbase account then change your email or simply move your coins to an offline wallet.

How phishing works

According to wikipedia:

Phishing is the attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details (and sometimes, indirectly, money) by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in anelectronic communication

The way the attack would work in this case is the hacker would take the associated email address with the bitcoin address and then try to “phish” your login info to either your email or the account associated with your email and BTC. The attacker might ask you to sign up for a website or a forum in order to get the Bitcoins, or he might ask you to login to blockchain and verify your address. Maliciously the attacker might replicate the blockchain site, or any other site to which you will be tricked into signing up. This has done before, and you can check out the full story about the blockchain.info phishing attempt HERE

Most people these days use the same password for multiple accounts and that is how attackers are able to compromise your accounts, by gaining access to one account all other accounts which used the same passwords will automatically also be compromised. So just as a friendly reminder please make sure you use different passwords and change them regularly.