Everything We Know about the Hacker Who Compromised FTX

An unidentified person stole 228,523 ETH (about $288.5 million) from FTX, and it came out that this person was ranked 35th on the list of the largest owners of the second most valuable cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

The Deal

A number of swaps and cross-chain activities were reportedly carried out by the attacker, as stated by experts from Beosin. He has assets worth approximately $338.6 million at the moment, the majority of which are held in Ethereum.

After the Beacon Chain deposit contract, numerous exchanges, second-level protocols, and DeFi bridges, the hacker was added to the list of Ethereum whales that CoinCarp compiled. It held a share of 0.19 percent. The top 20 wallets control approximately 27.7% of the total Ethereum supply on the market, and the top 50 wallets control approximately 33%.

Elliptic reports that the entire amount of damage caused by the hacker was $477 million, which is far greater than the preliminary estimate of more than $400 million. The majority of the ill-gotten gains were put into Ethereum by him. On that day, $186 million out of the total withdrawal amount of $663 million was sent by FTX directly to cold wallets.

At the time of the incident, experts that were interviewed by Cointelegraph admitted that the hack was carried out by an insider of the exchange.

Remember that, according to sources cited by CoinDesk, the FTX Chief Technology Officer Gary Wang, the FTX Head of Development Nishad Sing, and the former CEO of the firm, Sam Bankman-Fried, controlled the code, the exchange matching engine, and the funds. The publication’s interlocutor expressed skepticism over the possibility that one of the other employees may find it by engaging in harmful activity.

Both the previous head of MicroStrategy, Michael Saylor, and the current CEO of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, have advocated for the use of self-custody of cryptocurrency assets.

The Hacker Attack

A user who goes by the name Colin Wu reported on Friday the 21st that his FTX wallet had been compromised the previous Tuesday. The 3Commas API was used by the hacker to get access, and he stole around $1.6 million worth of cryptocurrencies.

After some time, reports of losses from other users began to come in. It is currently impossible to estimate how much damage was caused. It is important to note that some of the victims had never even heard of 3Commas or utilized the API.

The management of the service insisted that they had nothing to do with what had taken place and emphasized this point. There was not a hack in the traditional sense; rather, what occurred was an instance of a phishing attack.

Address believed to be involved with a breach of FTX has resumed operations

According to the information provided by PeckShield, the account started exchanging assets for Ethereum (ETH) after it made a withdrawal of more than $400 million from FTX on November 12.

In the beginning, it was sent 21,155 ETH, which is equivalent to 27 million dollars, from three other addresses that were also engaged in the bitcoin breach from the exchange.

After then, this account, which was known as FTX Accounts Drainer and was given the label Heist, gave the go-ahead for the DAI stablecoin to conduct operations on the GPv2VaultRelayer of the CoW Protocol.

The final amount, which originated from Celer Network and Stargate Finance, was transferred to Ethereum through cBridge and converted into 5,564.83 ETH. Additionally, 0.024 DAI were moved to the network of the cryptocurrency that has the second highest market capitalization.

You may remember that on November 11, the parent business of FTX, Alameda Research, along with over 130 other associated firms, filed for bankruptcy.

When asked about the likelihood of investors and customers of one of the top cryptocurrency exchanges recouping their losses, Bloomberg expressed considerable skepticism. The “hole” in the platform’s balance sheet is estimated to be worth at least eight billion dollars.