Fraudsters have used employees at web hosting service provider GoDaddy to attack multiple cryptocurrency services including Liquid over the past one week, KrebsOnSecurity reported.
US-based GoDaddy has acknowledged that limited number of GoDaddy employees fell for a social engineering scam. The company did not reveal how the employees were tricked by the fraudsters to make the unauthorised changes required for the attacks.
GoDaddy spokesperson Dan Race said the attacks led to modifications of a small number of customer domain names. The incident was still under investigation, Dan Race said.
The use of GoDaddy employees in the attacks came to light after cryptocurrency trading platform liquid.com last week reported a security incident that occurred on November 13.
“A domain hosting provider GoDaddy that manages one of our core domain names incorrectly transferred control of the account and domain to a malicious actor,” Liquid CEO Mike Kayamori said in a blog post.
“This gave the actor the ability to change DNS records and in turn, take control of a number of internal email accounts. In due course, the malicious actor was able to partially compromise our infrastructure, and gain access to document storage.”
Liquid said that the malicious actor might have been able to obtain personal information from its user database. This may include data such as email, name, address and encrypted password.
“After detecting the intruder we intercepted and contained the attack,” Mike Kayamori said.
Several other cryptocurrency services subsequently targeted by the fraudsters, the KrebsOnSecurity report indicated.
This type of social engineering is becoming increasingly common. Earlier this year, Twitter revealed a massive cryptocurrency hack that compromised several high-profile accounts.
Twitter said that the social engineering that occurred on July 15 targeted a small number of employees through a phone spear phishing attack.