Celsius email system breach leads to phishing attack on customers

Cryptocurrency rewards platform Celsius Network has disclosed a security breach exposing customer information that led to a phishing attack.

Today, Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky stated that Celsius' third-party marketing server was compromised, and threat actors gained access to a partial Celsius customer list.

"An unauthorized party managed to gain access to a back-up third-party email distribution system which had connections to a partial customer email list. Once inside the system, this unauthorized party sent a fraudulent email announcement, of which we know some of the recipients to be Celsius customers."

"The intent was to make the recipients believe the fraudulent email came from Celsius, that the fraudulent site was a true Celsius site, and to take ownership of recipients’ cryptocurrency assets from their personal (non-Celsius) wallet by prompting the user to provide the seed phrase to their personal wallet address," disclosed a Celsius advisory.

After gaining access to the customer list, the threat actors impersonated Celsius Networks in phishing texts and emails that promoted a new Celsius Web Wallet. As an incentive to get people to visit the site, the text states Celsius is offering $500 in the CEL cryptocurrency if they create a wallet and enter a special promo code.

Clicking on the link led recipients to the phishing site celsiuswallet[.]network, which is now down, that asked visitors to create a Celsius Web Wallet.

When you attempted to create this fake wallet, the site asked visitors to link their other online wallets and input those wallet's seed phrases. Once this seed phrase is provided, the threat actors can import your wallet and steal any cryptocurrency within it.

VirusTotal shows that the celsiuswallet[.]network phishing domain initially had a DNS SOA record that indicated it was registered at the Njalla registrar.

Njalla is a registrar located in Sweden that is a favorite for certain threat actors, such as the Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear Russian hacking groups.

The domain is 1 day old and registered through NJALLA. Njalla is a preferred registrar from Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear. This alone already shows the people behind this website have at least a little knowledge about Russian MO.

— Rickey Gevers (@UID_) January 12, 2021

A recent scam site using Njalla called 'Solar Leaks' was created to allegedly sell data stolen during the SolarWinds attacks.