Pepe memecoin website has suffered a front-end exploit

According to recent reports, the official website for the Pepe memecoin has been compromised in a front-end attack. Cybersecurity firm Blockaid detected the breach early, after which it put out an alert to the community informing them that the site had been injected with malicious code from the Inferno Drainer toolkit. 

The Inferno Drainer kit is a suite of scam tools usually employed by threat actors, including phishing website templates, wallet drainers, and social engineering tools.

The malware from the Inferno Drainer toolkit that the hackers are using is known to redirect visitors to phishing pages, ultimately designed to steal critical details like wallet credentials, approve unauthorized transactions, and drain assets like tokens, NFTs, and other holdings.

“Blockaid’s system has identified a front-end attack on Pepe. The site contains a code of inferno drainer,” the cybersecurity company shared on Thursday. 

Pepe’s price remains down

The price of PEPE did not react immediately to the hack, and it is a real possibility that the exploit may not be priced in yet, as the memecoin is up by about 0.87% over the last 24 hours. On the longer term, it is down by more than 77% over the last 12 months, according to CoinGecko.

Pepe price chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

The incident highlights the ongoing need for vigilance among crypto users, as that is the best defense against phishing scams and other cybersecurity threats. Users have also been urged to avoid the site until the issue is resolved. 

Hackers who use Inferno Drainer increased by almost three times last year, according to Blockaid, even though the team behind it claimed that they would shutter the scam service in 2023.

“At the beginning of the year, we saw about 800 new malicious Inferno Drainer DApps per week. Now, that number has tripled to 2,400 per week,” Oz Tamir, a former Blockaid engineer, told Cointelegraph in August 2024.

Since that time, the Inferno Drainer group and suite of tools have been linked to several social engineering scams, social media exploits, and malware-related crypto thefts, including the hack of the BNB X page in October.

The memecoin sector struggles to rebound

The cryptocurrency market has been especially volatile recently, and the memecoin sector has taken a real beating that has driven the category to its lowest valuation in 2025, dropping to a combined market capitalization of $39.4 billion, according to data aggregator CoinMarketCap. 

Toward the end of November, the sector lost over $5 billion in 24 hours, declining from $44 billion despite a 40% increase in trading volume. The sector is a long way from where it was in January, when the memecoin market cap collectively hit a high of $116.7 billion. 

Experts say the sharp sell-off mirrors a broader decline across the digital asset market. CoinGecko data backs it up, with the total crypto market cap falling from $3.77 trillion on November 1 to $2.96 trillion on Nov 21, wiping out $800 billion in just three weeks. 

Even United States President Donald Trump’s official memecoin took minor hits as other top memes saw double-digit declines in November. 

Things seem to be turning around as trading volume is slowly climbing back up, while the top ten memecoins have also shown adequate recoveries, with Dogecoin expected to touch the $0.396556–$0.504708 level by 2026, according to Cryptopolitan analysts.

December is also expected to be a good month for memes, especially if BTC consolidates and alts rotate. However, experts urge caution as memes are always volatile, no matter the month. 

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