The official website of Pepe (PEPE) memecoin has been compromised by an attacker and users are redirected to a malicious link.
“Blockaid’s systems have identified a front-end attack against Pepe. The site contains Inferno Drainer code,” the cybersecurity firm announced Thursday. Blockaid’s threat intelligence team told Cointelegraph:
“Blockaid detected Inferno drainer code on the Pepe frontend, which matches a known drainer family that we regularly identify. This is a frontend compromise that redirects users to a fake site that injects malicious code to drain their wallets.”
Inferno Drainer is a suite of deception tools used by threat actors, including phishing website templates, wallet drainers, and social engineering tools.
PEPE’s price did not immediately react to the hack. According to CoinGecko, the meme coin is up about 4% in the past 24 hours, but has fallen more than 77% in the past 12 months.
Cointelegraph reached out to Pepe Team for comment, but did not receive a response in time for publication.
This latest cybersecurity incident highlights the need for continued vigilance among cryptocurrency users as a defense against phishing scams and other cybersecurity threats. Users are advised to stay away from the site until the issue is resolved.
Related: $5 billion disappears in one day, meme coin market sinks to 2025 lows
Inferno Drainer activity increases despite claims that malware is going offline
According to Blockaid, usage of Inferno Drainer tripled in 2024, even though the team behind Inferno Drainer claims to shut down the fraudulent service in 2023.
“At the beginning of this year, there were about 800 new malicious Inferno Drainer DApps per week. Now that number has tripled to 2,400 per week,” former Blockaid engineer Oz Tamir told Cointelegraph in August 2024.
Since then, the Inferno Drainer group and suite of tools have been linked to several social engineering scams, social media exploits, and malware-related cryptocurrency thefts, including the hack of the BNB X page in October.
The attacker took control of the X account and posted several malicious links that lured users to connect to their wallets.
Binance co-founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao warned of the hack and told users not to interact with the links until the issue was resolved.
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