MyEtherWallet Hola VPN Compromised, User Accounts Exposed 🚨 This article is 6 years old...
MyEtherWallet Hola VPN Compromised, User Accounts Exposed
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Updated: Nov. 7, 2019 at 2:44 am UTC
Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash
So far in 2018, a series of major cryptocurrency exchange hacks have resulted in over $750 million stolen. On July 9, MyEtherWallet reported a security breach to its Hola VPN service that left user accounts exposed.
50 Million Accounts Potentially Compromised
MyEtherWallet (MEW), a globally renowned cryptocurrency management tool and web wallet, experienced a security breach to its Hola VPN browser extension that left user accounts exposed for approximately five hours on July 9.
MEW’s Hola VPN is a free browser extension with nearly 50 million users. During the security breach, hackers were able to access and monitor user accounts who toggled the VPN on and were actively using MEW.
Regular users of MEW were not affected by the hack, as the core platform itself remained uncompromised. Taking to Twitter, MEW warned Hola users of the security issue and advised them to transfer funds to a new account.
We received a report that suggest Hola chrome extension was hacked for approximately 5 hrs and the attack was logging your activity on MEW.
— MyEtherWallet.com (@myetherwallet) July 10, 2018
At the time of writing, it is unknown how many accounts were directly compromised, and there is no public mention of lost or stolen funds.
In an interview with TechCrunch, MEW stated that the attack “appeared to be a Russian-based IP address.” Adding to their statement, a MEW spokesperson said:
“The safety and security of MEW users is our priority. We’d like to remind our users that we do not hold their personal data, including passwords so they can be assured that the hackers would not get their hands on that information if they have not interacted with the Hola chrome extension in the past day.”
Two months ago, MEW experienced a DNS hijack resulting in 215 ether (~$152,000) stolen from users’ wallets.
Although MEW claims the issue derived from “vulnerabilities in public-facing DNS servers”– not its own security infrastructure, the event marks the first of two security breaches to occur in 2018 so far.
Users are reminded to use secure browser extensions that provide safeguards against potential phishing and scams.
