The term “account takeover” is about as ominous as it seems. It’s a looming threat that exists no matter who you are or what kind of account you have. When a hacker gains unauthorized access to your online account and the intent is malicious - that’s bad news.
While the name of this attack is pretty easy to decipher, there are a few things you may not know about it. From the intentions and tactics behind it to the mechanics surrounding how it works, we’re going to tell you everything you need to know about the account takeover (ATO) attack today.
The ATO attack poses a threat to both personal and corporate accounts. Whether the hacker is after a profit, seeking to disrupt service delivery, or out to generate fraudulent transactions, they tend to target any account that offers the most benefit to them.
In this type of attack, the hacker gains access to your account, at which point they can take your money, obtain personal information that allows them to impersonate you, or gain access to anything else you may own.
In the days of old, this attack targeted bank accounts, retirement accounts, and pretty much any other account that may contain money or personal information. While that certainly still happens, what looms out there today and in the future poses a risk to your crypto wallets and other digital currency accounts.
That means that with access to your wallet, they can transfer coins, manipulate tokens, save your recovery key, or simply lock you out of your account entirely. In a matter of seconds, you could lose everything.
There are quite a few ways hackers gain access to accounts or perform account takeovers. One of the most common ways hackers gain access to your account is through social engineering exploits like phishing.
This tactic involves deceiving you as the account owner into disclosing your login information. You may get an email that urges you to log in to your wallet to correct a problem. The link in the email leads you to a fraudulent website that looks like the real thing. Once you enter your information, your account is compromised.
The motivation behind these tactics varies. Targeting financial accounts, like traditional banks or crypto wallets, allows hackers to conduct fraudulent activity. They can create transactions and transfers out to their own accounts or make large purchases.
Impersonating others by gaining access to social media accounts has the added benefit of gaining the trust of others using a familiar name and face, which can lead to even more malicious activity within these types of crypto accounts and wallets.
As we break down the account takeover itself and how it all works the nuts and bolts don’t always look so pretty, but they’re effective. The real question is how is this attack so prevalent, given multi-factor authentication and all of the other security options available to us in the defi space.
Unfortunately, these precautionary measures aren’t always enough anymore. Most hackers use tools sophisticated enough to circumvent the things you might have set up to protect yourself. While credential guessing isn’t nearly as effective as it once was, there are other ways.
We already mentioned phishing, but in addition to that, hijackers can employ malicious software downloads or sinister links to gain access to saved passwords, recovery phrases, and other account information on your computer. These types of takeovers are hard to detect and prevent, so the hacker gets away with it pretty quickly and walks away with more than just your login information.
Phone-based scams are also common. It’s not difficult to scare someone into handing over their personal information with a simple phone call pretending to be a person of authority with word that your account is at risk if you don’t take action now.
As we’ve mentioned numerous times before, there are a lot of ways to prevent getting scammed. They’re not hard and they don’t take up a lot of time. It’s worth it to employ as many of these ideas as possible because it doesn’t hurt to have a failsafe, and you never know when you’ll need it. You can work to prevent ATOs in the following ways:
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