Top online animation tool LottieFiles hacked to target victim crypto wallets

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One person allegedly lost 10 BTC in the attack

Cryptocurrencies
Migliori Bitcoin wallet (Image credit: Shutterstock / Wit Olszewksi)

A popular online animation tool was abused to trick people into handing over access to their cryptocurrency wallets, with at least one individual losing close to $700,000.

LottieFiles is a platform that provides tools and a library for creating, editing, and sharing lightweight, scalable animations in the Lottie format. These animations, together with the plugin LottiePlayer, are commonly used in websites and mobile applications with 94,000 weekly downloads and has been downloaded more than 4 million times since its launch.

Recently, an unnamed threat actor somehow obtained a session cookie from one of the developers of LottieFiles, and used that access to push three new versions of LottiePlayer (2.0.5, 2.0.6, and 2.0.7) to npmjs. Websites that use LottiePlayer and were configured to always use the latest version have had the malicious versions downloaded automatically.

New version released

These new versions prompted website visitors to connect their cryptocurrency wallets, which basically gives the site access to the stored funds. We don’t know how many people fell for the trick and connected their wallets, but we do know that at least one person did, and it cost them 10 BTC, which is $696,960 at press time. This information came from Scam Sniffer, a Web3 anti-scam platform.

"On October 30th ~6:20 PM UTC – LottieFiles were notified that our popular open source npm package for the web player @lottiefiles/lottie-player had unauthorized new versions pushed with malicious code," the project’s co-founder and CTO, Nattu Adnan, wrote on GitHub. "This does not impact our dotlottie player and/or SaaS services. Our incident response plans were activated as a result. We apologize for this inconvenience and are committed to ensuring safety and security of our users, customers, their end-users, developers, and our employees."

The attacker was quickly ousted, and a new version - 2.0.8, pushed live. This is a copy of the last safe version, which was 2.0.4.

"We have confirmed that our other open source libraries, open source code, GitHub repositories, and our SaaS were not affected."

Via The Register

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Sead Fadilpašić

Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.