Unfortunately there were a number of Ethereum users who were unknowingly conned out of a total of $150,000 worth of Ethereum.
This certainly isn’t the most money lost in any single hack, but regardless, it could have been prevented if those individuals were aware of and took seriously, certain safety protocols.
They lost funds because the hackers were able to reroute the traffic intended for MyEtherWallet and sent them instead to a malicious site which pretty much just absorbed the funds being stored in the wallets of the individuals who logged into their wallet via the malicious site.
It’s been noted that the most impressive aspect to this hack isn’t the amount of Ethereum taken, but instead how the hackers were able to identify and take advantage of certain internet protocols like the Domain Name System (DNS).
In defense of the legit MyEtherWallet site, there was a warning issued highlighting the invalid security certificate.
There was a kind of tragic report from a man who apparently went to the MEW site and then * despite the security warning *, continued to log into his wallet and was greeted with a 10 second timer counting down the time until all of his funds would be transferred to the hacker.
Now that we generally know what happened, allow me to show you a pretty easy way to side step this situation altogether.
That way, you can have peace of mind knowing that you won’t be vulnerable to hacks like this in the future when you want to use MyEtherWallet in particular.
It’s pretty cool, essentially you can download an offline version of MyEtherWallet.
This means you don’t need to trust that the web servers are directing you to the legitimate MyEtherWallet web page.
Here’s how you do it:
Go to the MyEtherWallet GitHub.
Find and click on the etherwallet .zip file in order to download it.
You should then move this file onto a USB drive so that you can then plug it into your offline computer in the future.
Once your computer is disconnected from any internet connection, or if you want to use this on a computer that has never had access to the internet in the first place, you can plug in this USB drive and extract these files onto your computer.
Once you’re ready to interact with this offline version of MyEtherWallet, you can do so by selecting the index.html file which will open your web browser (even if you are not connected to an internet connection.)
From here you’ll be able to generate new wallets and send transactions by using the “Send Offline” section, all while being disconnected from the internet.
The MyEtherWallet team does reccommend periodically updating your now local version of MEW since they do update the actual website from time to time.
Additional Reading/Sources/Links:
More about the newest hack
MyEtherWallet GitHub
MEW guide for Offline access