Etherscan Introduces Enhanced Security Measure to Combat Address Poisoning Threats

• Address poisoning can impact individuals who have received unwanted tokens.
• To “poison” a user’s token, an attacker sends a token valued at approximately 0 or zero.

Etherscan, a widely used Ethereum blockchain explorer, has recently introduced changes that set the default to hide transfers of tokens with zero value.

This adjustment comes in response to reports of prevalent “address poisoning” attacks, which have been utilized to phish and spam unsuspecting users. With this update, users must enable the visibility option from the Etherscan settings page to view these tokens.

One type of phishing known as “address poisoning” can impact individuals who have received unwanted tokens but fail to verify their addresses before sending cryptocurrency.

To “poison” a user’s token, an attacker sends a token with a value around 0 or zero to the user’s address. Once this is accomplished, the transfer will be logged in the crypto wallet‘s history and may be inadvertently selected the next time funds are transferred.

Zero-value Tokens Hidden

The intended victim receives cryptocurrency mistakenly sent to a linked address. Hackers utilize advanced software to create counterfeit wallet addresses that closely resemble “poisoned” ones. Reports indicate that the initial or final characters of these fraudulent addresses are identical.

Etherscan has rendered zero-value token transfers invisible as a protective measure against such attacks. This ensures users are safeguarded from sending tokens to potentially compromised addresses, preventing attackers from gaining access.

However, users can access their zero-value balances at any time by disabling the security feature. The cryptocurrency community has expressed support for this recent update and is urging other block explorers to adopt similar functionalities.

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