Tether (USDT): hacking $ 30,000,000

It was not thought that Tether's problems would start with hacking, given recent controversy. Tether is a company that initiates a token - the USDT - which has a fixed exchange rate of 1: 1 with the dollar. They have been hacked and over 30,000,000 USDT are in the wild, $ 30,000,000. Tether had prepared for this type of attack and seems able to block the attacker's funds.

The Tether press release

Yesterday, we discovered that funds were withdrawn without authorization from the Tether portfolio, through the malicious action of an external attacker. Tether integrators must take immediate action, as we will see later, to avoid further disruption of the ecosystem.

30,950,010 USDT were withdrawn from Tether Treasury's portfolio on 19 November 2017 and sent to an unauthorized bitcoin address. Since Tether is the issuer of the USDT token, we will not redeem any of the stolen Tokens and we are trying to recover them, to prevent them from being scattered in the ecosystem. The attacker holds funds at the following address:

16tg2RJuEPtZooy18Wxn2me2RhUdC94N7r

If you receive USDT tokens from the above address, or any other address that receives tokens from this wallet, do not accept them because they have been marked by Tether and will not be exchangeable for dollars.

The following steps have been taken to address this issue:

The Tether wallet has been temporarily locked. A thorough investigation into the causes of the attack is underway to prevent similar actions from happening again in the future.
We will make the latest version of Omni Core available to the community. Omni Core is the software used by Tether integrators to support Omni Layer transactions. This version should prevent the hacker from moving the stolen funds to another address. We urge all Tether integrators to update their portfolios as soon as possible to isolate stolen tokens from the ecosystem. Once again, the striker's address tokens will not be exchanged for dollars. Therefore, all exchanges, portfolios and other Tether integrators must immediately install this software in order to avoid any loss: https://github.com/tetherto/omnicore/releases/tag/0.2.99.s
Note that this software will result in a change in consensus on running Omni Core clients, which means that it is a hard fork that should be temporary. Integrators running this version will not accept tokens from the attacker's address. This will block the pirate's funds.

We are working with the Omni Foundation to investigate ways that Tether can recover stolen tokens and fix the hard fork. Once this protocol enhancement is complete, the Omni Foundation will provide updated binaries that all integrators will be able to install. These builds will replace the binaries provided above with Tether.to. After updating the Omni Layer protocol, Tether will recover the stolen chips and put them back into cash.

The Tether show has not been affected by this attack, and all Tether tokens remain attached to assets owned by Tether. The only tokens that will not be exchanged are those that were stolen yesterday. These tokens will be reinvested in cash once the Omni Layer protocol enhancements are in place.

We will provide further updates as they become available, and we appreciate the patience, understanding and support of the community as we work to get the situation right in the best possible way, so that benefits everyone.

If Tether manages to escape unscathed, it will be a great victory and proof that even in case of hacking, the code can find solutions.