Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Liquid admitted that it is a victim of a crypto heist in which unknown hackers accessed nearly $94million worth digital currency from its digital wallets.This security breach is considered to be the second biggest crypto heist after poly network and also this is Liquid’s second major security incident. In November 2020 ,a threat actor social-engineered Liquid’s DNS provider and gained control over the exchange’s DNS infrastructure.
Liquid ranks among the top 20 crypto exchanges globally by daily trading volumes, processing more than $141 million of transactions in the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap data.
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsImportant Notice:
— Liquid Global Official (@Liquid_Global) August 19, 2021
We are sorry to announce that #LiquidGlobal warm wallets were compromised, we are moving assets into the cold wallet.
We are currently investigating and will provide regular updates. In the meantime deposits and withdrawals will be suspended.
According to a tweet by liquid,“We are sorry to announce that our warm wallets were compromised, we are moving assets into the cold wallet. We are currently investigating and will provide regular updates. In the meantime deposits and withdrawals will be suspended.”
Liquid did not put a dollar figure on the amount, but blockchain analytics company Elliptic said its analysis estimates the losses at about $94 million.This includes $30.9 million in ether, 12.9 million in XRP, $4.8 million in bitcoin, $7.7 million in stablecoins and $37.4 million in other tokens.
Liquid specified four blockchain addresses – in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tron and XRP – that are believed to be associated with the hacker.
The following are the hacker’s addresses that the assests had been transferred to:
BTC: 1Fx1bhbCwp5LU2gHxfRNiSHi1QSHwZLf7q
ETH/EWT: 0x5578840aae68682a9779623fa9e8714802b59946
TRX: TSpcue3bDfZNTP1CutrRrDxRPeEvWhuXbp
XRP: rfapBqj7rUkGju7oHTwBwhEyXgwkEM4yby
To avoid detection, the hackers further converted around $45 million stolen Ethereum tokens into Ether using decentralized exchanges like Uniswap and SushiSwap preventing them from having those assets frozen.
Liquid claimed that the hack targeted a multi-party computation (MPC) wallet. “This time, the MPC wallet (used for warehousing / delivery management of cryptographic assets) used by our Singapore subsidiary QUOINE PTE was damaged by hacking.” the company said.
Further the company said in the tweets “We are currently tracing the movement of the assets and working with other exchanges to freeze and recover funds and We will continue to do everything in our power to mitigate the impact from this incident and restore full service as soon as possible.”
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