The crypto market experienced a significant downturn after Bybit, a prominent cryptocurrency exchange, announced a devastating hack involving $1.5 billion worth of cryptocurrencies. This incident marks the largest crypto hack to date. Recent updates, including statements from the CEO, confirm that Bybit was compromised, resulting in the loss of approximately $1.5 billion in Ethereum.
Bybit Faces Biggest Hack in History
Bybit, the Singapore-based centralized crypto exchange, appears to have been hacked. Early estimates suggest the exchange has lost over $1.46 billion worth of ETH, though the investigation is ongoing.
The CEO described the hack on Bybit’s Ethereum multisig cold wallet, where attackers manipulated the signing interface to trick signers into approving a change in the wallet’s smart contract logic, allowing the theft of all ETH in that wallet.
CEO Ben Zhou said, “Bybit ETH multisig cold wallet just made a transfer to our warm wallet about 1 hr ago. It appears that this specific transaction was musked, all the signers saw the musked UI which showed the correct address and the URL was from Safe. However, the signing message was to change the smart contract logic of our ETH cold wallet. This resulted Hacker took control of the specific ETH cold wallet we signed and transfered all ETH in the cold wallet to this unidentified address. Please rest assured that all other cold wallets are secure. All withdraws are NORMAL. I will keep you guys posted as more develops, If any team can help us to track the stolen fund will be appreciated.”
On Tuesday, the exchange announced that it would conduct scheduled maintenance on its live server, extending from today into tomorrow. The hack was first reported by ZachXBT, who noted that according to on-chain data, mETH and stETH were actively being exchanged for Ethereum on decentralized exchanges (DEXs).
The attacker has transferred tens of thousands of Ethereum to 48 different addresses. ZachXBT has called on exchanges and services to blacklist these addresses to prevent further movement of the stolen funds.
Source: coinpedia.org
