Bybit Faces Historic $1.4 Billion Ethereum Hack
The cryptocurrency trading platform Bybit was breached for over $1.4 billion in Ethereum on Friday, in what cyber security professionals are labeling the largest theft ever aimed at a cryptocurrency exchange.
The company headquartered in Dubai indicated that the incident took place while they were transferring assets from a “cold” wallet — a wallet with private keys stored offline for safety purposes — to an online “warm” wallet.
“Regrettably, this transaction was tampered with via an advanced assault that concealed the signing interface, showing the correct address while modifying the underlying smart contract’s logic,” the firm stated in a message on X.
Investigation and Response: What Comes Next?
Renowned crypto investigator ZachXBT shared on his Telegram channel shortly after 10am EST that he had noted dubious outflows exceeding $1.46 billion from Bybit. A follow-up remark indicated that the assailant had distributed over 20,000 ETH coins to 48 different addresses.
Bybit has lost 8% of its total reserves and they are asking for help in finding the hackers. In a livestream to discuss the event on Friday, Bybit’s CEO Ben Zhou verified that 401,000 ETH coins had been pilfered. He reassured clients that other wallets had remained unaffected and mentioned that the exchange possessed sufficient liquidity to facilitate withdrawals and endure the situation.
“We have seen substantial withdrawals over the past two hours, and as of possibly 10 minutes ago, there are 4,000 withdrawals pending,” he noted in the early afternoon. “Bybit is fully backed… meaning all of the funds are in the wallet.”
Zhou conjectured that the breach’s origin could lie with the wallet provider Safe, which Bybit utilizes for its Ethereum cold wallet.
“It might be that a Safe server was compromised, but we cannot confirm,” he stated, mentioning that Bybit is collaborating with Safe to probe the incident.
In a social media update, Safe declared: “We have not detected any signs of the official Safe frontend being breached. Nevertheless, as a precaution, Safe{Wallet} is momentarily suspending specific functionalities.”
Prior to the breach, Bybit was reported to have reserve assets exceeding $16 billion. Zhou asserted that the firm had already secured bridge loans to cover 80% of the missing ETH.
The Bybit theft is anticipated to be recorded as one of the most prominent in a lengthy history of notorious robberies. The DeFi platforms Ronin Network and Poly Network each suffered losses exceeding $600 million in thefts.
North Korea’s Lazarus Group has been the most frequent perpetrator of crypto exchange thefts, transferring vast sums into Pyongyang’s state treasury. The blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis reported that $2.2 billion in cryptocurrency was taken through hacks last year.
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