The official website of the Pepe (PEPE) memecoin has been hit by a classic Web3 booby trap: a front-end attack that silently redirected visitors to malicious scam links. The breach, first identified by cybersecurity firm Blockaid on October 11, routed users toward phishing pages powered by the widely abused Inferno Drainer toolkit. Instead of warning screens or obvious glitches, users saw what looked like normal interfaces — until their wallets were asked to “sign something” they shouldn’t.

Technically, the blockchain side of Pepe remained untouched. No smart contracts were hacked, no protocol-level exploit was found. The problem lived entirely in the website layer — the visual interface people trust the most and understand the least. By injecting malicious scripts into the site’s front end, attackers were able to redirect visitors to fake dApps designed to trick them into connecting their wallets or approving transactions that drain funds in seconds.

According to Blockaid’s analysis, the redirected pages embedded components from Inferno Drainer, an off-the-shelf scam toolkit that comes pre-packaged with phishing templates, wallet-draining logic, and social-engineering UI elements. In other words, this wasn’t a one-off hack written from scratch — it was fraud-as-a-service plugged into a high-traffic memecoin brand.

Users were urged to avoid the Pepe website entirely until the breach was fixed. At the time of reporting, there was no clear, timely communication from the Pepe team. Cointelegraph also noted the absence of a response when they requested comment — a silence that ATH.LIVE analysts see as a security failure in itself. In 2025, they argue, “incident response is part of security — not PR.”

From a structural perspective, ATH.LIVE analysts describe the attack as a textbook example of where Web3’s threat surface has shifted. Blockchains like Ethereum remain extremely hard to break. But the interfaces — websites, front ends, browser extensions — are soft targets, especially when they control the final step before a transaction is signed. As they put it: “The weakest link is no longer the chain — it’s the click.”

If anything, the scale of the Inferno Drainer operation makes this even more concerning. Despite public claims in 2023 that the project would “shut down,” activity tied to the toolkit has surged. Blockaid has tracked a sharp increase in malicious decentralized applications built with Inferno Drainer components — from around 800 new scam apps per week to roughly 2,400 per week in 2024. Former Blockaid engineer Oz Tamir has linked the toolkit to fake airdrops, hijacked social accounts, and high-value wallet drain campaigns that often hit users who think they’re interacting with legitimate brands.

The most surreal part of the Pepe story is the market’s reaction. Instead of panic, forced selling, or a sharp drawdown, PEPE rallied about 4% in 24 hours. No matter how many red flags were raised in security circles, price action behaved as if nothing material had happened. For ATH.LIVE analysts, this is not surprising — it’s the essence of memecoin dynamics. “Memecoins don’t trade on risk models. They trade on mood,” they note. “Security matters in theory, but in practice, as long as the meme is alive, traders ignore the smoke until the fire reaches them personally.”

More broadly, the Pepe website hack shows how professionalized crypto fraud has become. Toolkits like Inferno Drainer industrialize the process: a small number of operators can launch thousands of scam fronts, attach them to trending brands, and harvest victims at scale. Instead of chasing deep protocol bugs, attackers now go after interfaces, habits, and trust. It’s cheaper, faster, and often more profitable.

ATH.LIVE concludes that this trend will only intensify unless the culture catches up: “The next wave of Web3 security won’t be about ‘perfect code’ — it will be about hardening the front end and educating users. Until people stop blindly signing transactions because a website looks familiar, front-end attacks will keep winning.”

In a decentralized world, the irony is obvious: the most fragile parts of the system are still the centralized websites everyone assumes are safe. Pepe’s latest incident is not just another meme drama — it’s a case study in how far attack tooling has evolved, and how slowly user behavior is adapting in response.