The United States and the FBI have recovered $680,000 worth of stolen cryptocurrency after hackers exploited a vulnerability in a crypto product created by SafeMoon in 2023.
A whopping $680,000 worth of cryptocurrency has been recovered and cleared after a hacker exploited a vulnerability in a smart contract, allowing the threat actor to abuse the now-defunct crypto company’s tokens.
The hacker manipulated SafeMoon’s cryptocurrency by making a transaction that burned a huge amount of SafeMoon tokens, resulting in an artificial price spike.
The threat actor then sold the tokens back to SafeMoon’s liquidity pool, a reserve of tokens locked in a smart contract that allows people to trade cryptocurrency.
However, when the hacker sold the artificially hiked cryptocurrency back to SafeMoon’s liquidity pool, the company suffered a massive loss.
The attack happened around March 29th, 2023, and the hacker managed to drain roughly $8.5 million on the day it was stolen, the Department of Justice said in a press release.
At the same time, a different threat actor set up a bot that engaged in “front-running,” another method of exploiting transactions, which halted the original hacker’s attack.
The stolen funds were then redirected to the bot operator's wallet, and the second attacker promised to return the funds to SafeMoon.
However, this wasn’t without a catch. The bot operator threatened to keep all the stolen cryptocurrency if SafeMoon refused to give them a percentage.
The now-defunct cryptocurrency company agreed to let the bot operator keep 20 percent of the stolen assets.
While neither the original hacker nor the bot operator has been identified, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) seized “$680,467.92 and 480.996 BNB from accounts at OKX, a cryptocurrency exchange platform, representing approximately half of the 20 percent extorted from SafeMoon,” the DoJ said.
While SafeMoon is now bankrupt, the funds have been returned to the company’s bankruptcy trustee.
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