Cryptocurrency scammers have reportedly created a fake website that contains several links to download the widely-used Wasabi Bitcoin (BTC) wallet. However, some of these are “spoofed” links because they don’t actually lead to official Wasabi website.

Those looking to download the Windows version of the open-source Wasabi cryptocurrency wallet should be careful because online scammers have placed a malicious file with an “.msi” extension under what appears to be a link to Wasabi’s Windows OS-compatible wallet.

The fraudulent site, wasabibitcoinwallet.org, created by an unknown group of hackers, lists four different versions of Wasabi’s wallet. These include wallet links for macOS, Linux, and Windows users.

“The First Malware That Pretends To Be Wasabi”

Twitter user @nopara73, the co-founder of Wasabi wallet, revealed via the microblogging platform that he had discovered what could be “the first malware that pretends to be Wasabi (http://wasabibitcoinwallet.org).” He also pointed out that “only the Windows download link points to their own website, [while] the rest” of the links were to their GitHub page.

Using A Decompiler To Deconstruct Hackers’ Original Source Code

Going on to caution against the potential severity of the problem, the Wasabi wallet developer noted that no search engines were able to detect the malicious file (with the “.msi” extension).

Commenting on the matter, Nicolas Dorier, a C# and Bitcoin developer, recommended “installing [the program] on a virtual machine (VM), extracting the files, and [trying to] disassemble” with ILSpy, an open-source .NET assembly and decompiler. This, Dorier said, will help in determining “what sh*t they are doing.”

Malware Programs Can Adjust Their Behavior By Detecting A Virtual Machine Environment

Acknowledging that Dorier’s suggestion may be helpful, the Wasabi co-founder said that he would try to look into this issue. However, he said his time would be better spent “building rather than this.”

Meanwhile, Ethan Heilman, the CTO and co-founder of Arwen, an organization focused on the development of security solutions for centralized digital asset exchanges, warned against running the malware through a VM. Heilman explained that VMs “were not intended to used for  isolating malicious code.” He added that “lots of malware checks [whether] it is running in a VM [environment] and changes its behavior [accordingly].”

He also suggested:

You should isolate your analysis machine from your developer [or code execution] machine by using a different computer for malware analysis and creating an isolated network environment.