Early Ethereum address safely transfers $4.6M despite poisoning attack

An address that received ETH in Ethereum’s 2015 genesis block safely transferred 2,154.94 ETH, worth about $4.6 million, despite an address poisoning attack, CoinDesk reported. Address poisoning is a scam in which an attacker sends a small amount of funds from a fake address resembling a real counterparty so the record appears in a user’s transaction history, potentially tricking the user into copying it and sending funds to the wrong destination. The wallet had never sent ETH out before, but at 10:04 p.m. UTC on Nov. 9 it made a 0.05 ETH test transfer to a new address. Immediately after the test transfer, attackers created two fake addresses with similar opening and ending characters to the real receiving address and repeatedly sent small amounts of ETH to the wallet. One of the fake addresses sent funds 43 times. The wallet owner, however, was not fooled and at 10:42 p.m. UTC on Nov. 9 successfully sent 2,154.94 ETH to the address first used in the test transfer.