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James Edwards Claims $160M in Cryptocurrency Theft Couldn’t Be Made by External Attack
Programmer James Edwards, under the nickname Librehash, accused the Wintermute team of hacking the project “from the inside”. After analyzing the transactions and platform code, the specialist came to the conclusion that the attack could not have been organized only from the outside.
Wintermute is a market maker providing liquidity to over 50 crypto platforms such as Binance, Kraken, FTX, Coinbase and more. Last week, the founder of the platform, Yevgeny Gaevoy, reported that hackers hacked into Wintermute and stole about $160 million worth of assets.
According to Gaevoy, the attack became possible due to the vulnerability of the addresses generated using the Profanity service, which were already known about. Back in the middle of summer, the company began switching to another, more reliable method of generating addresses, but due to a mistake by employees, such an address still worked, which was used by the hacker.
However, as a result of his research, Edwards argues that the knowledge required to perform this hack rules out the possibility that the hacker was a random outsider who simply recovered the private key to an insecure address.
Edwards described in detail the analysis of transactions and how he came to his conclusions. Also, he put some questions to the developers of the project, but there were no answers. The Wintermune team has yet to comment on the allegation.
After the platform was hacked, Yevgeny Gaevoy said that the team was ready to leave 10% of this amount to the hacker who stole $160 million in cryptocurrency from the protocol in exchange for the return of the rest of the stolen funds.
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