A rising number of the cryptocurrency exchange’s accounts are compromised after the Bitfinex hack. Besides, the platform warns its customers about the sudden abundance of phishing websites posing as Kraken.

Hacker attacks on Kraken users have intensified in August, as registered by the exchange’s security:

“Three weeks ago, we notified many clients of actual or attempted breaches of their Kraken accounts.  The attackers appeared to be operating from a list of usernames/passwords obtained from another Bitcoin company,” the announcement reads.

The actual company is not named, but the rise of hackers’ activity coincides with the security breach on Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange on 2 August resulted in a theft of bitcoins worth over $60 mln. 

“While we do not have conclusive evidence that the events are related, information from our clients indicates an extremely strong correlation,” notes the statement.

Kraken also quotes a massive evidence from its customers who have fallen victims to phishing websites appearing in the ads and top search results of the main search engines.

After a thorough check, we at CoinFox can confirm that all main search engines including Google, Yahoo and Bing return phishing websites and ads in the top search results. According to the company, it is not easy to put down the scam ads and their effort at reporting the false recourses so far “only resulted in temporary removal.”

According to users, many phishing sites successfully mask their web addresses and front pages to imitate the original Kraken website. Thus, one of them kraken1.com features only a single extra character in the domain name and a web page closely mimicking real Kraken. It is easy for inexperienced users to overlook those details and give away their login info to the scammers. The original Kraken blog post gives helpful tips how to recognise a fraudulent ad or website.

“After clicking a link in search results, it is important to always verify that you have landed on the domain you expected,” the exchange insists.

Those users who have given away their login details to fraudsters are advised to immediately log in to Kraken.com, change their password and activate two-factor authentication.

Elena Platonova