After a couple of breaches and a close call, MyEtherWallet (MEW) apparently is playing safe and is warning its users about every possible threat that could come their way. This time it seems that users of Hola’s Chrome extension are in potential danger. In a tweet, MEW urged them to transfer funds immediately to a newly-created account.
https://twitter.com/myetherwallet/status/1016542459185119232
Although the alleged incident is completely beyond MEW developers’ control, they have decided to warn their users, possibly attempting to prevent any harm to the reputation of the wallet platform.
According to MEW, Hola reportedly has experienced a breach that had lasted about five hours, allowing hackers to log any activity that users of the extension may have done on the wallet platform.
The breach supposedly has ended, so MEW users could just go ahead, make a new account and transfer all their coins there, emptying the old wallets, which would cost them transaction fees.
One could say that proprietary alternatives are not much better, but they reduce the chance of hacker’s attempts to breach them just because there are so many out there. Hola, on the other hand, has millions of users, most of which are even used as exit nodes for those who pay for the service. It is not a bad model, per se, but it still opens the network up to the possibility of infiltration.
The company has been criticized in the past by Frederick Brennan - the founder and previous owner of 8chan, one of the most popular sites for meme culture - particularly because of the practice of using other people’s computers to uphold its VPN infrastructure. A website created by security researchers and circulated through 8chan has said that Hola “in reality [...] operates like a poorly secured botnet”.
This is the second time that MyEtherWallet was caught up in the breach of another service than its own. Nearly three months ago, the website’s DNS was poisoned because of a vulnerability in the name servers that routed traffic to it.
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