The research exposes FreeDrain, an industrial-scale crypto theft network exploiting free-tier hosting and SEO manipulation to lure victims into phishing traps, stealing cryptocurrency seed phrases and draining funds globally. It highlights the campaign’s infrastructure, workflow, and mitigation challenges. (Affected: Cryptocurrency wallets, Free-tier hosting platforms, Cryptocurrency users)
Keypoints :
- FreeDrain is a vast crypto-phishing network abusing free-tier platforms like Gitbook, Webflow, and Github.io to host lure pages.
- The campaign uses SEO poisoning and spamdexing (mass comment spam) to rank malicious pages highly in search engine results.
- Victims find phishing pages by searching wallet queries such as “Trezor wallet balance” and clicking top-ranked malicious results.
- Lure pages typically show legitimate wallet interface screenshots and redirect users through multiple intermediate domains.
- Final phishing sites mimic real wallet services and capture seed phrases to drain victim funds quickly via automated infrastructure.
- Attackers use generative AI tools to instantly create scalable phishing content and domain generation algorithms for redirectors.
- Phishing backends are simple but effective, often hosted on Amazon S3 and Azure Web Apps, sometimes staffed by live operators via chat widgets.
- Infrastructure analysis points to operators predominantly working in the Indian Standard Time (UTC+05:30) timezone.
- Free-tier content platforms lack sufficient abuse detection and streamlined reporting, enabling prolonged campaign persistence.
- Disruption is difficult due to high scale, infrastructure rotation, and the widespread use of trusted free hosting domains.
MITRE Techniques :
- Search Engine Optimization (T1608) – Manipulating search rankings to surface phishing pages to victims.
- Phishing (T1566) – Creating fraudulent pages mimicking cryptocurrency wallet interfaces to steal credentials.
- Compromise Infrastructure (T1584) – Abuse of free-tier legitimate hosting platforms to deploy malicious content.
- Domain Generation Algorithms (DGA) (T1568.003) – Use of algorithmically generated redirector domain names for evasion and persistence.
- Data from Local System (T1005) – Harvesting seed phrases from input fields on phishing pages.
- Data Staged (T1074) & Exfiltration Over Web Service (T1041) – Sending stolen seed phrases to attacker-controlled servers over HTTP POST requests.
- Obfuscated Files or Information (T1027) – Some basic obfuscation via varied text and unicode tricks on lure pages (minor).
- Account Manipulation (T1098) – Use of automated infrastructure and live operators to maintain victim engagement and increase success rate.
- Phishing via Trusted Third Parties (T1192) – Hosting malicious content on trusted web platforms (Gitbook, Webflow, Github) to evade detection.
Indicator of Compromise :
- The article lists thousands of malicious lure page URLs hosted on free-tier domains like gitbook.io, webflow.io, and github.io.
- Multiple redirector domains with algorithmically generated names (e.g., antressmirestos[.]com) used to funnel victims.
- Phishing URLs hosted on cloud services such as Amazon S3 buckets (e.g., ledg-01jghe0fhdk.s3.eu-north-1.amazonaws[.]com) and Azure Web Apps (e.g., atomicwallet.azurewebsites[.]net).
- JavaScript snippets included in phishing pages send harvested seed phrase data via AJAX POST to specific API endpoints (e.g., rfhwuwixxi.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws[.]com).
- Metadata such as commit timestamps and email addresses from Github repositories link infrastructure to operators in UTC+05:30 timezone.
Read more: https://www.validin.com/blog/freedrain_unmasked/
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