The revelation that a hacker added an extra 7,500 Ethereum (ETH) from compromised FTX accounts to the total amount, now 22,500 ETH, has worried the cryptocurrency community. The recent information revealed that a security flaw allowed 7,500 ETH to be taken without authorization from some FTX accounts.
This results in losses for impacted account holders of almost $12.62 million at the current market price. This comes after the Coingape platform disclosed a first transfer of 2,500 ETH, valued at more than $4 million, from a wallet connected to the compromised FTX accounts. The repeated loss of 7,500 more ETH highlights cryptocurrency exchanges’ susceptibility to sophisticated hacker operations.
The transfer of 1,200 ETH, worth $8 million, is said to have been made through the Railgun private wallet. Investigation shows that the decision to pass the stolen money through a private wallet may make it more difficult for investigators to follow the movement of the assets. The initial wallet still has 12,500 ETH, worth roughly $21 million, while the remaining ETH is currently kept in an intermediary wallet.
The incident has raised concerns over the responses taken by cryptocurrency exchanges in the event of security lapses and illicit fund withdrawals. Exchanges have increased their investments in cybersecurity measures as a result of the recurrent worry over security breaches in the cryptocurrency sector.
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As of press time, FTX has yet to provide specific information on how they plan to recover the stolen funds. However, it is anticipated that the exchange will be making frantic efforts to look into the situation, try to recover the missing money, and strengthen its security procedures to avoid similar incidents in the future.
The said hacker was said to have succeeded in taking $600 million worth of ETH, and nothing has been heard of the hacker since then. There have been several events that have been fingered to have triggered this event. Godfrey Benjamin, an analyst with CoinGape, said the proposed launch of the Ethereum Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) may have triggered this event.
On the other hand, it has been speculated that this may be a distraction from the upcoming Sam Fried case, which was also once accused of perpetrating such an act. The hacker was also said to have previously deposited the stolen digital assets to the CoinMixer platform, which offers anonymous BTC mixing platform created to make bitcoin tracking difficult.
It was also gathered that Thorchain Router on the 30th of September, a platform that helps cryptocurrency users make anonymous transactions across multiple blockchains, was also used to make a 700 ETH transaction. Data from Arkham disclosed that the hacker made the transaction on two occasions, with each of them containing 2,500 ETH and worth $4 million.