AngelX drainer takes aim at TON and Tron with 300 deployments

A new version of the Angel wallet drainer, AngelX is now circulating, with support for Toncoin (TON) and Tron (TRX), according to a news release from the cryptocurrency cybersecurity firm BlockAid.

BlockAid says AngelX is a major escalation in threat severity compared to its previous version. Attackers are now shifting their focus from affirmed blockchains to less mature networks, the firm said.

“They perceive these chains as less equipped to defend against attacks, due to a lack of robust security tools and support,” BlockAid said in a statement.

AngelX’s spread rapidly accelerates

This new version of AngelX launched Aug. 31, and in four days BlockAid detected it being deployed in more than 300 malicious decentralized applications (DApps.) BlockAid thinks AngelX’s rate of deployment has doubling almost daily during this period, meaning a rapidly accelerating growth of this piece of malware.

“This surge represents a substantial increase in malicious activity, positioning AngelX as one of the most aggressive wallet drainers in recent months,” BlockAid concluded.

A crypto or wallet drainer is a form of malware that targets cryptocurrency wallets by tricking the victim into consenting to a malicious transaction. Once tricked, the perpetrator steals everything in the account.

BlockAid was able to access an instance of the AngelX control panel and assess its “highly customizable configuration options.” The tool purportedly showed that significant resources were poured into making a scam’s setup easier than before.

The news follows reports that in January hackers specifically targeted prominent verified X accounts to promote crypto scams and drop links to drainers. Just last month, a trader lost about $1 million in a single hour after investing in Solana-based (SOL) memecoin MBAPPE. The token was revealed to be a scam token promoted by the hacked X account of French soccer superstar Kylian Mbappé.

Hacking celebrity social profiles to promote scams is nothing new. In late June, he official X account of hall-of-fame metal band Metallica was briefly compromised to promote a crypto scam.

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