- this is the most common method of a hacker to steal our funds. And it usually preys on newbies who don't know anything about the crypto space. What is happening is that there will be a pop-up in our metamask wallet asking to enter the seed phrase or a link will open saying to enter the seed phrase. Like for example to claim airdrops even if they don't know where they got it, and of course out of curiosity they will enter the newbies that they don't know will be hacked. A simple social engineering method can easily trick people without proper knowledge in the crypto industry. And when that happens, the investors have no recourse. The wallet is compromised, all funds will be scraped or lost, and the only solution that can be done is to create a new wallet and not use the old wallet that was hacked. Because there is no way for you to recover the wallet even if you report to the police.
[2] Direct Transfer
- Also one of the methods of hackers and what they do is they will send an email from a legitimate person or company and say that you send them coins and they will promise to return its value in a larger amount.
But for those of us who have been in this industry for a long time, we already know this gimmick. But of course the newbies don't know that because of course there are still people out there who bite the hackers' bait. Sometimes scammers do a trick using metamask if the wallet has been compromised. There is a signature request that will appear but the truth is that it is just hiding its function hall. What will happen is that the fund will be transferred to the scammer. And sometimes it's a security update but it's the same. When this happens, the fund cannot be recovered but the wallet can still be used, that's why it's dangerous.
However, such tricks are difficult to detect especially if we do not track what web3 website we are using.
[3] Approval
- also one of the methods of hackers or scammers to steal your funds. A way for them to access our tokens or NFTs. The Approval or Permit has two flavors. This is the onchain transaction that grants access to our NFTs or tokens. What the scammers do is legitimize the transactions that we will approve, but in reality our tokens or nft will be transferred to another wallet. And they can do this by creating update applications that request permission and once we approve that, they will have full access.
So normally what these scammers will do is they will make it appear that we have received airdrops and we need to claim it, and sometimes we will receive an email like that. Like the example in the picture, sometimes in groups or social media channels you will see something like that.
Of course we already know this kind of trick and we don't just believe in it of course. But as usual with newbies they don't know this, so newbies always be careful.
[4] Permit
- It is also a way to get access to our wallet like the approval, the only difference is that an off chain signature is needed here instead of an onchain transaction like the picture below. The process is almost the same as the approval.
Now the only solution to avoid this is to be vigilant about the decentralized applications we access, and always check the url of the website and make sure that the one we access is the official website. And when we receive a link to the airdrops, don't just believe it, because normally the project owners don't do this. So it should be confirmed first on their official channel or their social media channels.
And our other solution here is to revoke the approval after we used the applications. It's just a different way of disconnecting connected sites, though we also need to disconnect the site from the metamask. And we have a certain website for this, all we need is that we have a balance in our wallet for the transaction we will do here because we are dealing w/ onchain transaction. So we have to pay the gas fee here, and the most popular here is https://revoke.cash/
all we do here is connect the wallet and the beauty here is that almost all blockchains are available to them. Once you see it, you just revoke it so that your wallet's connection to that application will be lost forever.
So we will just do this every time we have an interaction with decentralized applications, Defi or any nft market place just so we can be sure even if we pay a fee at least our wallet is secure especially if the wallet we use has funds.
Or another solution here that we can do for additional protection is that we can install a web3 antivirus in the chrome extension, its job is that before we use metamask, it runs first if there is a threat in metamask or not. Because if something suspicious is seen, it will give you a warning.