DEdetaro·Mar 23, 2022
lol, a lot of "metaXXXX" "fixes" in the PRs too... https://github.com/MetaMask/eth-phishing-detect/pulls
In Show HN: We made an open-source personalization engineMetaMask
eth-phishing-detect
TypeScript2018–2022
MetaMask / eth-phishing-detect
eth-phishing-detect
Utility for detecting phishing domains targeting Web3 users
8Distinct people
8Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.3KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Utility for detecting phishing domains targeting Web3 users
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year8 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-04-01 04:54:57 UTC to 2022-03-23 17:00:52 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
8 sourcesAccording to the code on https://github.com/MetaMask/eth-phishing-detect/blob/45ea5cf..., looks like that everything within Levenstein distance of 3 from whitelisted hosts (like "metamask.*") is blocked.
Metarank and Metamask have the distance of 3. I've made a ticket some time ago in their github repo (https://github.com/MetaMask/eth-phishing-detect/issues/6855), but it seems that it was lost in thousands of similar tickets.
In Show HN: We made an open-source personalization engineThe detector is about twenty (inefficient) lines. Cauctus was flagged because it's similar "cactus" is similar to "auctus", which is on their known good list of domains they're checking for impersonations of.
https://github.com/MetaMask/eth-phishing-detect/blob/master/...
In Cactus Comments: Federated web comments based on Matrix protocolIt seems to be a false positive in the phishing detector:
https://github.com/MetaMask/eth-phishing-detect/issues/4749
In Cactus Comments: Federated web comments based on Matrix protocolThanks for pointing this out. No idea, why it appeared on the list. There's already a github issue https://github.com/MetaMask/eth-phishing-detect/issues/3835
In Show HN: Visualize any topic on Hacker NewsProbably has something to do with the domain being similar. That is what is says here too: https://metamask.github.io/eth-phishing-detect/
"This domain was blocked for its similarity to metamask.io, a historical phishing target."
It also seems like someone has already filed an issue on their Github (https://github.com/MetaMask/eth-phishing-detect/issues/3762) a month ago.
In Show HN: Chrome extension to blur personal data before screen captureHm, I get this too because I have MetaMask. It uses this library: https://github.com/MetaMask/eth-phishing-detect
Running the detector on 'sanctus.io' gives a fuzzy match against the whitelisted domain 'auctus.org'. That's pretty odd, and clearly is a false positive. I guess it's better safe than sorry, but there should be an error message on that page that says something like "We think this site is pretending to be auctus.org, if you think this is a false positive than click here to continue".
In “Lifefaker.com makes faking perfection easy”Interesting. The MetaMask phishing detector keeps a blacklist of URLs/domains and compares a site's domain against it using the levenshtein distance algorithm. So it could be a false positive. After a quick check I didn't find Auditus on there:
https://github.com/MetaMask/eth-phishing-detect/blob/master/...
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