Hacks
Tornado Cash saga left a void, says Chainalysis chief scientist: Finance Redefined
Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you significant developments over the last week. Chainalysis chief scientist shared his views on the Tornado Cash saga and said that the incident has left a void for illicit fund mixing services, but the real impact of the sanctions could be determined in the long run. The staking ecosystem of Ethereum post Merge could have a significant impact on the crypto economy, according to a new report. Institutional lending platform Mapple Finance launched a $300 million lending pool for Bitcoin mining farms. The Tribe DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization, voted in favor of repaying affected users of the $80 million exploit on DeFi platform Rari Capital’s liquidi...
Profanity tool vulnerability drains $3.3M despite 1Inch warning
Decentralized exchange aggregator 1inch Network issued a warning to crypto investors after identifying a vulnerability in Profanity, an Ethereum (ETH) vanity address generating tool. Despite the proactive warning, apparently, hackers were able to make away with $3.3 million worth of cryptocurrencies. On Sept. 15, 1Inch revealed the lack of safety in using Profanity as it used a random 32-bit vector to seed 256-bit private keys. Further investigations pointed out the ambiguity in the creation of vanity addresses, suggesting that Profanity wallets were secretly hacked. The warning came in the form of a tweet, as shown below. RUN, YOU FOOLS ⚠️ Spoiler: Your money is NOT SAFU if your wallet address was generated with the Profanity tool. Transfer all of your assets to a different ...
DApp activity rises 3.7% in August for the first time since May: Finance Redefined
Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you significant developments over the last week. Decentralized applications, or DApps, finally showed a glimmer of recovery in August as the daily average of unique active wallets rose by 3.7% compared to May. With just under a week left for the Merge, SEBA Bank has opened Ethereum staking services for institutions. On the other side, layer-2 scalability solutions are hopeful of seeing a significant cut in their carbon emissions post Merge. This past week, two DeFi protocols became victims of coordinated flash loan attacks. On Wednesday, Avalanche-based lending protocol Nereus Finance became the victim of a crafty hack that saw a user net $371,000 worth of USD C...
FBI seeks Bitcoin wallet information of ransomware attackers
Three federal agencies in the United States — the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center — jointly issued an advisory seeking information to curb ransomware attacks. As part of the #StopRansomware campaign, the joint cybersecurity advisory alerted citizens of Vice Society, a ransomware-type program that encrypts data and demands ransom for decryption. The trio anticipates a spike in ransomware attacks, primarily aimed at educational institutions, adding that “School districts with limited cybersecurity capabilities and constrained resources are often the most vulnerable.” While proactive measures remain vital to counter ransomware, the FBI asked US citizens to report infor...
Elon Musk-crypto video played on S. Korean govt’s hacked YouTube channel
A YouTube channel owned by the government of South Korea was reportedly hacked and renamed SpaceX Invest, following which the channel uploaded fabricated videos of Elon Musk discussing cryptocurrencies. On Sept 3, the South Korean government’s YouTube channel was momentarily hacked and renamed for sharing live broadcasts of crypto-related videos. However, the account was soon restored within four hours following a proactive intervention, confirmed a local report from Yonhap News Agency (YNA). The above screenshot was provided to YNA by a locale that shows the compromised channel being renamed to SpaceX Invest and streaming videos depicting SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The compromised ID and password of the YouTube channel were identified as the root cause of the hack. Google, too, reportedl...
PwC Venezuela Twitter account hacked, attacker shills fake XRP giveaway
An attacker gained access to PwC Venezuela’s Twitter account and has been actively posting cryptocurrency phishing links for the last 8 hours at the time of the writing. Considering that all the tweets posted by the hacker remain active, it is evident that PwC officials are yet to realize the compromise. Investors clicking on the links remain at risk of being defrauded by the hacker. If not mitigated promptly, the threat may be catastrophic, considering that PwC Veleneula’s Twitter currently boasts over 37,000 followers. Cointelegraph has reached out to PwC Venezuela to inform them about the hack. PwC Venezuela has not yet responded to Cointelegraph’s request for comment. Related: Elon Musk-crypto video played on S. Korean govt’s hacked YouTube channel BlueBenx, a Brazilian crypto le...
Kyber Network offers bounty following $265K hack of decentralized exchange
KyberSwap, the decentralized exchange built on liquidity protocol Kyber Network, has offered a hacker 15% of the funds from a $265,000 exploit as a bug bounty. In a Thursday blog post, Kyber Network said a hacker had used a frontend exploit to pilfer roughly $265,000 worth of user funds from KyberSwap. The protocol said it will compensate all users for any missing funds related to the exploit, and directly addressed the hacker to give them an opportunity to return the funds in exchange for “a conversation with our team” and 15% of what was taken — roughly $40,000. “We know the addresses you own have received funds from central exchanges and we can track you down from there,” said Kyber Network. “We also know the addresses you own have OpenSea profiles and we can track you through the NFT c...
Blockchain audits: The steps to ensure a network is secure
The last few years have seen blockchain platforms becoming the centerpiece of many tech conversations across the globe. This is because the technology not only lies at the heart of almost all cryptocurrencies in existence today but also supports a range of independent applications. In this regard, it should be noted that the use of blockchain has permeated into a host of novel sectors, including banking, finance, supply chain management, healthcare and gaming, among many others. As a result of this growing popularity, discussions pertaining to blockchain audits have increased considerably, and rightly so. While blockchains allow for decentralized peer-to-peer transactions between individuals and companies, they are not immune to issues of hacking and third-party infiltration. Just a ...
What is a seed phrase and why is it important?
A seed phrase might be confusing and probably you might be wondering how a seed phrase looks and maybe how it is created. The seed phrase is generated by a cryptocurrency wallet and the user has no way of customizing it. The words generated are derived from a list of 2048 words. So, how many words is a seed phrase? A seed phrase is made up of a long string consisting of a group of random words. The words on a seed phrase are simplified so that the user can remember them, unlike if the seed phrase consisted of long numbers or special characters. The recovery phrase consists of 12 to 24 words like energy, road or open. To avoid errors, these randomly generated words do not include pairs like “man” and “men” in the same seed phrase. Bitcoin im...
Hacker tries to exploit bridge protocol, fails miserably: Finance Redefined
Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you significant developments over the last week. This past week, there were some major developments in the run-up to the upcoming Ethereum Merge slated for Sept. 15. Bitfinex became the latest crypto exchange to throw its support behind the chain split token. While DeFi bridge hacks have become a norm this year, developers behind Rainbow Bridge managed to foil an exploit attempt within seconds, leading to the hacker losing their safety deposit. The Tornado Cash developer who was arrested last week was sent to 90-day judicial custody awaiting charges. It didn’t go down well with the crypto community, who have actively rallied behind the developer and have accused...
Ethereum advances with standards for smart contract security audits
The Ethereum ecosystem continues to witness a flurry of activity that has individuals and organizations deploying token contracts, adding liquidity to pools and deploying smart contracts to support a wide range of business models. While notable, this growth has also been riddled with security exploits, leaving decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols vulnerable to hacks and scams. For instance, recent findings from crypto intelligence firm Chainalysis show that crypto-related hacks have increased by 58.3% from the beginning of the year through July 2022. The report further notes that $1.9 billion has been lost to hacks during this timeframe — a figure that doesn’t include the $190 million Nomad bridge hack that occurred on August 1, 2022. Although open source code may be beneficial for...
Can Web3 be hacked? Is the decentralized internet safer?
Web3 came into existence posed as a blockchain-powered disruption to the current state of the internet. Yet, as a nascent technology, a fog of assumptions plagues discussions about the real capabilities of Web3 and its role in our day-to-day lives. Considering the promise of a decentralized internet using public blockchains, a complete transition to Web3 would require scrutiny across several factors. Out of the lot, security stands as one of the most crucial features as, in a Web3-powered world, tools and applications hosted over the blockchains go mainstream. Smart contract vulnerabilities While the blockchains that host Web3 applications remain impenetrable from being hostage to attackers, hackers target the vulnerabilities within the project’s smart contracts. Smart contract attacks on ...
