The team of the well-known crypto-wallet Electrum published information about a threat from its "clone" Electrum Pro. The program is designed to steal bitcoins.
Electrum was first released in 2011 and has since become one of the most popular bitcoin-wallets. Electrum Pro appeared in March. The new application clearly used brand name without permission. Its creators also launched electrum.com, a website very similar to the original page - electrum.org.
The Electrum team claims that Electrum Pro is a bitcoin-stealing malware. They provided a detailed explanation at Github.
“This document describes how to decompile the "Electrum Pro" Windows binaries, and how to verify that they indeed contain bitcoin-stealing malware. We previously warned users against "Electrum Pro", but we did not have formal evidence at that time,” – Electrum representatives wrote.
Developers published the binary with a few extra lines added by the scammers. “A thread is started that sends an HTTP POST request to their website, and its payload is the user's seed,” – they added.
To guarantee safety, users should only download binaries from official sources and checking GPG signatures is advised. Alternatively, the more tech savvy ones can run from source, or build binaries themselves. Those who has stored their funds with Electrum Pro should transfer their coins to new wallets as soon as possible.
By Ekaterina Ulyanova