Two abnormal Ethereum transactions, as a result of which the sender paid $ 5.2 million in commission, are related to extortion. This is the opinion of PeckShield analysts.
On June 10, an unknown person transferred 0.55 ETH, having paid 10,668 ETH (about $ 2.6 million) as a commission.
The next day, 350 ETH were sent from the same address with a similar anomalously high commission.
PeckShield experts believe that this is due to the extortion of a hacker who gained partial access to the exchange’s hot wallet.
In their opinion, the sequence of actions looked like this:
- as a result of a phishing attack, the hacker gained access to the address;
- multi-signature technology did not allow an attacker to send funds to their wallets;
- he discovered that he could transfer cryptocurrency to addresses from the exchange’s white list and control the price of gas by simply “burning” the platform’s funds;
- The hacker made two transactions with abnormal commissions and demanded a ransom from the exchange, threatening to spend all available assets.
According to PeckShield, 21,000 ETH (about $ 5 million) remain in the wallet. Analysts noted that the hacker continues to control server permissions for the wallet, and the exchange is not able to prevent possible further losses. The affected trading floor at PeckShield was not named.
Another Ethereum transaction with extremely high fees attracted the attention of users this week - the address associated with the MiningPoolHub pool paid 2310 ETH ($ 538 thousand) for the transfer of 3221 ETH ($ 751 thousand).
Production Director of the Forecast Foundation, the organization behind the Augur project, Tom Kaysar believes that this happened as a result of a direct hack into the pool wallet.
