According to its CEO, Wintermute, a market-making organization, has been hacked for $160 million in the latest eye-watering crypto crime.
Early Tuesday morning, CEO Evgeny Gaevoy said on Twitter that the firm was the victim of an ongoing attack that had stolen cash from its Defi activities.
A transaction marked as an exploit by blockchain monitoring tool Etherscan revealed tens of millions of dollars in Dai stablecoin, USD Coin, Tether, Wrapped ETH, and other currencies moved from the firm to a wallet address branded “Wintermute Exploiter.”
Market makers, such as Wintermute, play an important role in the cryptocurrency ecosystem by providing liquidity to exchanges by keeping huge quantities of various cryptocurrencies in reserve in order to promptly execute a big purchase or sell order. Because these reserves must be accessed quickly, some increased security techniques, such as storing money in offline “cold storage” wallets, cannot be employed, posing a larger security risk. Wintermute, as one of the major market-making organizations, would have been an appealing target for hackers.
According to Gaevoy, the firm is financially solvent and has more than double the amount of the stolen monies in equity. Clients who had a market-making arrangement with Wintermute would not lose money, but the service would be affected for a few days until the issue was resolved, according to the CEO.
Though the actual method of attack is unknown, Blockworks said that the assault might have been carried out by exploiting a newly discovered weakness in vanity wallet addresses produced by a program called Profanity. Ethereum addresses are made up of 40 hexadecimal characters that are normally random — however, programs exist to produce a vast number of alternative addresses until one that has a certain desired sequence, such as a phrase or name, is identified.
