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In this article, we will try to remember all the major theft of cryptocurrencies over the past 10 years.
1. Bitstamp $5.3 mln (BTC), January 4th, 2015
On January 4, 2015, the operational hot wallet of Bitstamp announced that it was hacked by an anonymous hacker and 19,000 Bitcoins (worth of $5 million) were lost.
The initiation of the attack fell on November 4, 2014. Then Damian Merlak, the CTO of the exchange, was offered free tickets to punk rock festival Punk Rock Holiday 2015 via Skype, knowing that Merlak is interested in such music and he plays in the band. To receive the tickets, he was asked to fill out a participant questionnaire by sending a file named “Punk Rock Holiday 2015 TICKET Form1.doc”. This file contained the VBA script. By opening the file, he downloaded the malware on his computer. Although Merlak did not suspect wrong and has opened the "application form", to any critical consequences, this did not open access to the funds of exchange.
The attackers, however, did not give up. The attack continued for five weeks, during which hackers presented themselves as journalists, then headhunters.
Finally, the attackers were lucky. On December 11, 2014, the infected word document was opened on his machine by Bitstamp system administrator Luka Kodric, who had access to the exchange wallet. The file came to the victim by email, allegedly on behalf of an employee of the Association for computer science, although in fact, as the investigation showed, the traces of the file lead deep into Tor. Hackers were not limited to just one letter. Skype attacker pretending to be an employee of the Association for computing machinery, convinced that his Frame though to make international honor society, which required some paperwork. Kodric believed.
By installing a Trojan on Kodri?'s computer hackers were able to obtain direct access to the hot wallet of the exchange. The logs show that the attacker, under the account of Kodric, gained access to the server LNXSRVBTC, where he kept the wallet file.dat, and the DORNATA server where the password was stored. Then the servers were redirected to a certain IP address that belongs to one of the providers of Germany.
There are still no official reports of arrests in this case. Obviously, the case is complicated by the fact that the hackers are outside the UK, and the investigation has to cooperate with law enforcement agencies in other countries.
2. GateHub $9.5 mln (XRP), June 1th, 2019
Hackers have compromised nearly 100 XRP Ledger wallets on cryptocurrency wallet service GateHub. The incident was reported by GateHub in a preliminary statement on June 6.
XRP enthusiast Thomas Silkjær, who first noticed the suspicious activity, estimates that the hackers have stolen nearly $10 million worth of cryptocurrency (23,200,000 XRP), $5.5 million (13,100,000 XRP) of which has already been laundered through exchanges and mixer services.
GateHub notes that it is still conducting an investigation and therefore cannot publish any official findings. Also, GateHub advises victims to make complaints to the relevant authorities of their jurisdiction.
3. Tether, $30.9 mln (USDT), November 19th, 2017
Tether created a digital currency called "US tokens" (USDT) — they could be used to trade real goods using Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ether. By depositing $1 in Tether, the user received 1 USD, which can be converted back into fiat. On November 19, 2017, the attacker gained access to the main Tether wallet and withdrew $ 30.9 million in tokens. For the transaction, he used a Bitcoin address, which means that it was irreversible.
To fix the situation, Tether took action by which the hacker was unable to withdraw the stolen money to fiat or Bitcoin, but the panic led to a decrease in the value of Bitcoin.
4. Ethereum, $31 mln (ETH), July 20th, 2017
On July 20, 2017, the hacker transferred 153,037 Ethers to $31 million from three very large wallets owned by SwarmCity, Edgeless Casino and Eternity. Unknown fraudster managed to change the ownership of wallets, taking advantage of the vulnerability with multiple signatures.
First, the theft was noticed by the developers of SwarmCity.
Further events deserve a place in history: "white hackers" returned the stolen funds, and then protected other compromised accounts. They acted in the same way as criminals, who stole funds from vulnerable wallets — just not for themselves. And it all happened in less than a day.
5. Dao (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) $70 mln (ETH), June 18th, 2016
On June 18, 2016, members of the Ethereum community noticed that funds were being drained from the DAO and the overall ETH balance of the smart contract was going down. A total of 3.6 million Ether (worth around $70 million at the time) was drained by the hacker in the first few hours. The attack was possible because of an exploit found in the splitting function. The attacker/s withdrew Ether from the DAO smart contract multiple times using the same DAO Tokens. This was possible due to what is known as a recursive call exploit.
In this exploit, the attacker was able to "ask" the smart contract (DAO) to give the Ether back multiple times before the smart contract could update its own balance. There were two main faults that made this possible: the fact that when the DAO smart contract was created the coders did not take into account the possibility of a recursive call, and the fact that the smart contract first sent the ETH funds and then updated the internal token balance.
It's important to understand that this bug did not come from Ethereum itself, but from this one application that was built on Ethereum. The code written for the DAO had multiple bugs, and the recursive call exploit was one of them. Another way to look at this situation is to compare Ethereum to the Internet and any application based on Ethereum to a website: if a website is not working, it doesn't mean that the Internet is not working, it simply means that one website has a problem.
The hacker stopped draining the DAO for unknown reasons, even though they could have continued to do so.
The Ethereum community and team quickly took control of the situation and presented multiple proposals to deal with the exploit. In order to prevent the hacker from cashing in the Ether from his child DAO after the standard 28 days, a soft-fork was voted on and came very close to being introduced. A few hours before it was set to be released, a few members of the community found a bug with the implementation that opened a denial-of-service attack vector. This soft fork was designed to blacklist all the transactions made from the DAO.
6. NiceHash, 4736.42 (BTC), December 6th, 2017
NiceHash is a Slovenian cryptocurrency hash power broker with integrated marketplace that connects sellers of hashing power (miners) with buyers of hashing power using the sharing economy approach.
On December 6, 2017, the company's servers became the target of attack. At first, Reddit users reported that they could not access their funds and make transactions — when they tried to log in, they were shown a message about a service interruption. In the end, it became known that the service had undergone a major cyberattack and 4736,42 Bitcoins disappeared without a trace.
Despite heavy losses, NiceHash was able to continue working, but CEO and founder Marco Koval resigned, giving way to a new team. The company managed to maintain the trust of investors and began to strengthen the protection of its systems.
7. Mt.Gox, 850000 (BTC), June 19th, 2011
The Hacking Of Mt.Gox was one of the biggest Bitcoin thefts in history. It was the work of highly professional hackers using complex vulnerabilities.
A hacker (or a group of hackers) allegedly gained access to a computer owned by one of the auditors and used a security vulnerability to access Mt.Gox servers, then changed the nominal value of Bitcoin to 1 cent per coin.
Then they brought out about 2000 BTC. Some customers, without knowing it, conducted transactions at this low price, a total of 650 BTC, and despite the fact that the hacking hit the headlines around the world, no Bitcoin could be returned.
To increase investor confidence, the company has compensated all of the stolen coins, placed most of the remaining funds in offline storage, and the next couple of years was considered the most reliable Bitcoin exchanger in the world.
However, it was only an illusion of reliability.
The problems of the organization were much more serious, and the management probably did not even know about them.
CEO of Mt.Gox, Mark Karpeles, was originally a developer, but over time he stopped delving into technical details, basking in the rays of glory — because he created the world's largest platform for cryptocurrency exchange. At that time Mt.Gox handled over 70% of all Bitcoin transactions.
And, of course, there were those who wanted to take advantage of the technological weakness of the service. At some point, hackers made it so that Bitcoins could be bought at any price, and within minutes millions of dollars worth of coins were sold — mostly for pennies. World prices for Bitcoin stabilized in a few minutes, but it was too late.
As a result, Mt.Gox lost about 850,000 Bitcoins. The exchange had to declare bankruptcy, hundreds of thousands of people lost money, and the Japanese authorities arrested CEO Mark Karpeles for fraud. He pleaded not guilty and was subsequ...
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