The cryptocurrency exchange Bybit was hacked for more than $1.4 billion worth of Ethereum on Friday in what cybersecurity experts are calling the largest-ever theft targeting a cryptocurrency platform. Zhou speculated that the source of the compromise could have been the wallet provider Safe, which Bybit uses for its Ethereum cold wallet. In a livestream to address the incident on Friday, Bybit CEO Ben Zhou confirmed that 401,000 ETH coins had been stolen. The Dubai-based company said the incident occurred when the company was moving funds from a “cold” wallet — a wallet whose private keys are kept offline for security reasons — to an online “warm” wallet. “Unfortunately, this transaction was manipulated through a sophisticated attack that masked the signing interface, displaying the correct address while altering the underlying smart contract logic,” the company said in a post on X. The widely followed crypto investigator known as ZachXBT posted on his Telegram page just after 10am EST that he had observed suspicious outflows from Bybit of more than $1.46 billion. “It could be that a Safe server was hacked, but we don’t know,” he said, adding that Bybit is working with Safe to investigate the incident. North Korea’s Lazarus Group has been the most prolific perpetrator of crypto exchange robberies, transferring huge amounts of funds into Pyongyang’s state coffers. He assured customers that other wallets had not been impacted and said the exchange had enough liquidity to honor withdrawals and to survive the incident. The blockchain monitoring firm Chainalysis said $2.2 billion worth of cryptocurrency was stolen through hacks last year. In a post on social media, Safe wrote: “We have not found evidence that the official Safe frontend was compromised.
This Cyber News was published on therecord.media. Publication date: Fri, 21 Feb 2025 19:55:05 +0000