Crypto: Ethereum's Pectra Update Could Be Exploited By HackersConsidered a decisive step toward account abstraction, the Pectra update is already disrupting security balances on Ethereum. Introducing the EIP-7702 standard, supported by Vitalik Buterin, it allows wallets to temporarily behave like smart contracts. However, barely deployed, this innovation is being widely exploited to automate attacks. Far from eliminating risks, the protocol’s evolution creates new, subtler ones that hackers are already eager to exploit.The new Ethereum update, named Pectra, has been deployed on the network and marked a major technical milestone, although the market remained indifferent to this development.

According to Wintermute, a quantitative trading company active in the Ethereum ecosystem, one of the introduced features, EIP-7702, has been massively diverted for malicious purposes. This proposal allows wallets to temporarily adopt the capabilities of a smart contract, which exposes users to automated attacks.