MetaCert Prevented DNS Spoofer From Intercepting $60,000 Ether Transaction
Amid a sea of scams, MetaCert protected ORCA Alliance with a preemptive warning through our security software before a high stakes transaction was made.
MetaCert builds tools that protect teams, remote workers and large organizations from phishing-led cyberattacks.
A fine example of how well MetaCert protects customers comes from cryptocurrency banking startup, ORCA Alliance. To close an important deal, ORCA’s Co-founder and CTO, Dmitrij Radin, had to make a time sensitive payment in Ether.
I needed to make a transfer in a time frame of 4 hours and the sum was more than $60K,” explained Radin. “It was a payment for an exclusive media campaign.
The catch? During the transfer window, the MyEtherWallet service had become the target of a DNS spoofing campaign.
Radin was alerted to the potential threat when he tried to visit myetherwallet.com — when MetaCert blocked access with a warning.
According to Radin:
That day, when I entered MEW, MetaCert acted differently. Instead of getting the usual green shield, the website was blocked. So in the first place MetaCert saved me from loosing my keys and funds.”
Under normal circumstances Radin would have been able to wait for things to blow over, but that wasn’t the case; if he missed the payment window, Radin would miss out on a better than 30% discount. Given the urgency of the situation, it was MetaCert’s capacity to provide live monitoring of MyEtherWallet that ultimately won the day for Radin:
I checked MEW every five minutes and as soon as MetaCert became green I tried to make a small transfer. Then bigger. And then the whole sum. So everything worked. We got a deal and a discount. Bad guys didn’t get my funds and keys, and I achieved a new experience and knowledge.
Stories like that of Kori Williams (account no longer exists), Brand Strategist and Founder/Creative Director of Miami based advertising firm, MasonryDigital, are a big part of the reason MetaCert got into the game of protecting society from phishing-led cyberattacks in the first place. Kori had been a member of a Slack community under siege by a direct message phishing campaign. Kori found herself an inadvertent target of a scammer and, unfortunately, ended up losing out.
MetaCert’s Founder and CEO Paul Walsh happened to be in the MyEtherWallet slack group when Kori, in tears and seeking help, explained how she discovered the missing balance in her cryptocurrency wallet. After some deliberation it was determined that Kori had been indeed been scammed, fooled into clicking a malicious link. Kori’s story of loss was like so many others Paul had witnessed, and he decided enough was enough.
Paul put together a team of experts and MetaCert began to build towards a solution; today it is our enterprise grade MetaCert Security App for Slack (MetaCert no longer has a security integration for Slack). The tool monitors for threats in all messages across public and private channels as well as Direct Messages. When this tool became available 2017 the communities who integrated it saw an immediately difference; phishing threat was nullified.
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