Tag: Hack

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Crypto News Hackers

‘Ethical’ Hacker Returns $9 Million of the $190 Million Nomad Exploit

After cryptocurrency bridge Nomad was exploited by hackers to the tune of US$190 million earlier this week, those responsible have sent back US$9 million.

Since then, a recovery wallet has been set up for the safe return of any other funds they may wish to reimburse:

An Attack of Ethics, or Hackers’ Remorse?

Blockchain security and data analytics company PeckShield detected the initial return of stolen funds to Nomad, primarily in the form of USDC alongside USDT and other altcoins.

Then, on August 3, Nomad posted a tweet requesting the return of the remainder of the funds:

Nomad is a protocol that allows users to transfer tokens from Ethereum to other chains. The August 1 exploit appeared to be the outcome of a flaw in its smart contract. This means a multitude of users, with no technical knowledge, were able to find a transaction that worked, modify the target address with their own, and rebroadcast it.

Some of the users who raked in the stolen funds were, in fact, trying to assist the project by preventing the crypto from falling into the wrong hands. Nomad is appealing to these “ethical researchers” and “white hat hackers”, and has provided a crypto custodian (Anchorage Digital) to handle and safeguard the returned assets.

The Kindness of (Some) Hackers

In February this year, one white hat hacker chose a mere US$2 million bug bounty over the option of “printing unlimited ETH”. The hacker reportedly decided to warn the Optimism team of an issue rather than take the opportunity to print the ETH.

In June, another vigilante hacker was paid US$6 million for preventing a US$330 million hack. Two months earlier, the bug had been reported to Aurora via ImmuneFi, a leading Web3 bug bounty platform. All that is known about this hacker is their Ethereum domain name: pwning.eth.

Categories
DeFi Hackers

DeFi Platform Warp Finance Recovers 75 % Of $5.85M Stolen Funds

Warp Finance announced the recovery of $5.85M, 75% of funds stolen on December 17 — when an attacker withdrew a $7.76m through a flash loan exploit.

The DeFi platform said the distribution and compensation of the stolen funds for the affected users will begin on December 21. The compensation is proportional to the number of W-DAI (DAI stablecoin) and W-USD (U.S. Dollar) held at the moment of the snapshot.

While the hacker got away with nearly $8M, the DeFi firm managed to retrieve the loan collateral. White Hat hackers, which is slang for ethical hackers — helped to locate and secure the funds. Approximately 75% of users will get a reimbursement.

The attacker managed to hack Warp Finance by using several flash attacks, like multiple flash loans through dYdX protocols, flash swaps via Uniswap, and flash liquidity.

IOU Tokens For Compensation

Warp Finance plans to compensate for the remaining 25% loss with IOU tokens. According to the firm, the Portal IOU tokens will refund users in a near future, and even giving them a profit on their initial deposits.

While we are relieved that lost funds have been partially recovered, we see this only as a first step to making Warp Finance users whole. For this reason, we will issue Portal IOU tokens to every affected user. The end goal of the IOU token is to fully refund users and potentially even giving them a profit on what they initially deposited. 

Stated the firm .

Cyber-crimes have seen a surge in 2020, with more than $100M stolen including recently 8M stolen from DeFi insurer CEO Ciphertrace,  a cryptocurrency forensics and blockchain threat intelligence firm, reported on November 11 that 45% of all thefts in the first six months of 2020 were Defi hacks, equating to about $51.5M — 40% of volume for that period.

Categories
DeFi Ethereum

CEO of DeFi Insurer, Nexus Mutual, Loses US$ 8M In A Targeted Attack

An unknown attacker drained 370,000 NMX tokens from Hugh Karp, CEO and founder of the DeFi insurance firm Nexus Mutual. The amount stolen is equivalent to US$ 8M.

The firm announced the attack on Monday 14 UTC. The subject gained remote access to Karp’s personal computer and modified the Metamask extension, which facilitates web applications to communicate with the Ethereum blockchain.

Immediately, the attacker, who apparently is also a member of the firm, drained an amount equivalent to $8 million by implementing a different extension — tricking Karp into signing a different transaction, and sending the funds to the attacker’s address.

According to the investigations, the attacker is a member of the firm, and only Mutual members can receive NMX. But the firm hasn’t “completely identified” the subject. Although, weeks ago, the attacker completed a KYC (Know Your Customer) — a process that financial institutions do to verify their client’s identity.

The personal address from Hugh Karp, taken from Etherscam.io

The attacker has already converted some of the stolen 370,000 NMX tokens into 334ETH — which is equivalent to US$ 200,000.

Besides, according to data from Coinmarketcap, the price for the NMX token fell a considerable amount since the announcement was made, now at -18,40% by the time of writing.

NMX token chart, from coinmarketcap.