Winter mute Loses $160 Million in Latest Crypto Hack
Latest Crypto Hack
Modified Date:- Published Date:-Categories: Cryptocurrency
Winter mute Loses$160 Million in Latest Crypto Hack
Bulkof the Stolen Funds Moved to Curve
Winter mutefounder and CEO Evgeny Gaevoy revealed the hack incident in a tweet thread onTuesday (September 20, 2022). According to Gaevoy, two out of the 90 differentassets that were compromised “have been for nationtal over $1 million (and nonemore than $2.5 million),” with the executive assuring that there would be nomajor selloff.
Meanwhile,on-chain sleuth ZachXBT shared the hackers’ wallet address which held nearly$163 million, with a screenshot revealing that the attackers already moved $114million to Curve Finance’s 3crv, leaving a balance of close to $48 million inthe wallet.
According toPolygon’s chief security officer Mudit Gupta, the hacker compromisedWintermute’s hot wallet. This was likely due to the fact that the wallet wasgenerated using Profanity, a vanity address generating tool for Ethereum. Vanitaddresses refer to human-readable addresses and Profanity is a tool that can beused to generate such addresses.
Recently, abug was discovered on the Profanity tool. This bug rendered addresses generatedby the tool vulnerable to hackers. Decentralized exchange aggregator 1inchpreviously issued a warning stating that funds in vanity addresses generated byProfanity were not safe, further revealing a vulnerability in the Ethereumvanity address generating tool.
FundsAre ‘Safu’
Although thefunds were drained from the market maker’s DeFi operations, Gaevoy said thatthe hack incident did not affect Wintermute’s centralized finance (CeFi) andover-the-counter (OTC) operations.
Gaevoy inthe tweet thread stated that the platform is solvent with more than two timesthe hacked amount ($160 million) left in equity. The CEO further assuredlenders about the platform’s solvency, while stating that Wintermute will honorrequests to recall any loans.
However, theWintermute boss gave no further details such as the time and nature of theattack but said that the team was open to treating the incident as a “whitehat,” encouraging the hackers to contact the firm.
The latestdevelopment comes a few months after an attacker stole 20 million Optimism (OP)tokens due to an error from Wintermute’s end. As previously reported bycrypto.news, the hacker sold one million OP tokens which were bought byWintermute. One million OP coins were later sent to an address belonging toEthereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, while the hacker returned 17 million OPtokens to Optimism.
Hackers have stolen $160 million worth of cryptocurrency from a firm that develops tools for online gambling providers. The latest development comes a few months after an attacker stole 20 million Optimism (OP)tokens due to an error from Wintermute’s end.