Ethereum’s New Upgrade Backfires – Hackers Steal $1.5M Overnight

The upgrade, introduced with May’s Pectra hard fork, was designed to make wallets smarter by letting regular Ethereum addresses temporarily act like smart contracts. While this allows users to bundle multiple actions into a single transaction, security experts say it has also created new attack surfaces.

A Growing Wave of Scams

Anti-fraud service Scam Sniffer has tracked at least three major cases this month alone. In the most recent incident, a victim unknowingly signed a batch of malicious approvals disguised as routine transfers. Within seconds, attackers swept $1.54 million in tokens and NFTs, later bridging much of it to Ethereum’s mainnet.

Just days earlier, another investor lost $1 million in a near-identical trap mimicking a Uniswap interface, while a separate case in June saw $66,000 vanish. The method is consistent: fake DeFi sites lure users into approving hidden transfers that drain entire wallets.

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Warnings from Security Firms

Wintermute researchers had already flagged the risks back in June, noting that most delegations tied to EIP-7702 were pointing to identical “sweeper” contracts designed to instantly steal incoming ETH.

Scam Sniffer says the threat is escalating as more addresses upgrade under the new standard, with many users unaware of the dangers.

What Users Can Do

Experts advise extra caution when signing batch transactions and avoiding unfamiliar interfaces, no matter how convincing they look. The safest approach, they stress, is sticking to trusted applications and double-checking every permission request.

EIP-7702 may have been meant to streamline Ethereum, but for now, it’s giving hackers an efficient new playground.

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