Your overview of big crypto hacks in July
This month has seen a record number of hacks on the Etherium network plus an exchange hack.
In this post you will see which hacks have been executed over the past few weeks, how they were executed and how much money was stolen.
Thursday 29th of June: Bithumb - $1 Million worth of cryptocurrencies stolen.
By hacking a pc of an employee of Bithumb, a hacker was able to access disposable passwords of customers, access the customer accounts and steal $1 million worth of Bitcoins. In addition personal details were accessed. According to Hackernews, “more than 100 Bithumb customers have already filed a complaint with the National Police Agency's cybercrime report center regarding the hack” and “South Korean officials are now investigating the incident”.
Monday 17th of July: Coin Dash - “$7 Million worth of Etherium stolen.
By a simple trick, just 13 minutes after the sale opened, an unknown attacker was able to change the Etherium address on the company’s website that investors were supposed to send their contributions to. During this attack, investors sent 43438.455 Etherium to the address owned by the attacker. Not long after, the company was forced to pull out of the token sale and take the site offline. Despite the huge losses incurred, CoinDash confirmed that they would deliver the investors the corresponding tokens “whether or not they sent funds to the correct address.”
The CoinDash website is live again, though with little mention to the recent problems noted in the ICO.
Wednesday July 19th - Parity Technologies - $31 Million worth of Etherium stolen.
Parity reported that 3 of its multisig wallets were hacked and funds totaling of $31 million was stolen. The clients affected are reportedly: ‘Edgeless Casino’, ‘Swarm City’ and ‘æternity blockchain’.
Haseeb Qureshi explains the process in a very detailed manner in his article on freecodecamp and I can only recommend reading it as it was a joy to read. He sums it up nicely in the introduction: “Around 12:00 PST, an unknown attacker exploited a critical flaw in the Parity multi-signature wallet on the Ethereum network, draining three massive wallets of over $31,000,000 worth of Ether in a matter of minutes.”
Maybe even more daunting was the fact that a group of ‘white hat hackers’ who are hacking to protect the blockchain analysed and understood what happened and preemptively drained more than 150mln USD before the attacker was able to do more damage. The white hat hackers are in the process of returning the assets belonging to the account holders. However, the losses of the 3 wallets affected earlier stand and constitute the 2nd biggest loss on the Etherium network ever, following the $50 million DAO in 2016.
Sunday 23rd of July: Veritaseum's ICO - $8.4 Million worth of Ethereum.
In a “sophisticated” but further undisclosed hack, an attacker stole 37k VERI tokens and immediately exchanged them for Etherium in a market seeing high demand for these tokens at the time. Veritaseum founder Reggie Middleton stated on bitcointalk “there is at least one corporate partner that may have dropped the ball and be liable. We'll let the lawyers sort that out, if it goes that far.”
Hackread confirmed that the “hack is still being investigated, and so far there is limited information out there.”
Middleton was concerned but also saw the hack as inconsequential: "There are 100M tokens issued; the hackers stole about 37k. As I said, it is quite disconcerting, but it is not the end [of] the world. In the scheme of things, this is small."
That makes the total number nearly 50 mln USD of Etherium related hacks. Lets hope August will bode better in terms of security.
Stay tuned!
Images:
http://thehackernews.com/search/label/Ethereum%20exchange
Sources:
http://thehackernews.com/2017/07/ethereum-cryptocurrency-heist.html
http://thehackernews.com/2017/07/ethereum-hack.html
http://fortune.com/2017/07/18/ethereum-coindash-ico-hack/
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1887061.msg20348125#msg20348125
https://www.hackread.com/veritaseum-hack-another-ethereum-ico-hacked-loses-84m/
https://thehackernews.com/2017/07/bitcoin-ethereum-cryptocurrency-exchange.html#
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