Cointelegraph's crypto news outlet has suffered a phishing attack with a fake airdrop.

The crypto publication Cointelegraph became a victim of a phishing attack, during which the attackers used a frontend exploit of the site to display fake pop-up messages about a token giveaway and steal user data.

On the night of June 23, 2025, Cointelegraph confirmed the information on social network X:

The attack mimicked a “fair launch” of a new token, allegedly on behalf of Cointelegraph itself, promising to reward loyal readers nearly $5500 in the form of crypto assets.

It was previously mentioned that the smart contract allegedly passed an audit from CertiK — this also turned out to be untrue.

This is not the first such case recently: two days earlier, the website for tracking crypto asset prices CoinMarketCap experienced a similar attack. At that time, visitors were also asked to connect their wallets “for verification,” after which the attackers gained full access to users’ crypto assets.

TRM Labs calculated that phishing schemes and attacks through infrastructure accounted for 70% of the $2.2 billion losses in the crypto industry in 2024.

Recall that the incident with Cointelegraph occurred after a recent leak of more than 16 billion passwords, among which were credentials from Google, Telegram, Facebook, GitHub, and other platforms — they are often used to attack crypto users.