Phishing attack on hardware wallet leads to $282M crypto theft

Blockchain analysts continue to report traces of a theft of at least $282 million in crypto assets that occurred on January 10th, following an unfortunate social engineering attack.

For example, crypto security specialist CertiK’s team said today that it detected deposits into the crypto mixer Tornado Cash related to the theft earlier this month. According to them, $63 million in stolen funds were sent to ThorSwap, a decentralized exchange, where the stolen bitcoin (BTC) and litecoin (LTC) were swapped for ethereum (ETH) before continuing the laundering process and ultimately being sent to the mixer.

Meanwhile, crypto security firm zeroShadow claims that, after a tip from BTC exchange BitcoinVN about unusually high transaction volume with funds tracing back to THORChain, on which ThorSwap operates, they were able to freeze $700,000 before the money was swapped for the privacy-focused monero (XMR) cryptocurrency.

The theft was first reported by blockchain security expert ZachXBT on January 16th. According to him, on January 10th at around 11 p.m. UTC, an unknown victim lost the aforementioned millions due to a hardware wallet social engineering scam.

“The attacker began converting the stolen LTC and BTC to Monero via multiple instant exchanges, causing the XMR price to sharply increase. BTC was also bridged to Ethereum, Ripple, and Litecoin via THORChain,” the analyst said at the time.

Indeed, following the attack, XMR jumped around 70% over the next few days, though it has since lost some of those gains.

While it is unknown whether the victim is a private individual or an organization, ZachXBT claims that the infamous North Korean hackers are not behind the crime.

As reported, criminals increasingly use social engineering to trick users into giving away their crypto assets. This trend is often exacerbated by leaked or stolen user databases.

For example, the latest incident once again involved major hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger, whose customer data, such as names and contact information, was leaked via its third-party retail and e-commerce platform, Global-e, earlier this January.

Meanwhile, as also reported, social engineering has caused hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for customers of the major crypto exchange Coinbase.

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