Pierluigi Paganini
July 25, 2017
A clamorous cyber heist makes the headlines, an unknown hacker has stolen nearly $8.4 Million worth of Ethereum cryptocurrency, the hack hit Veritaseum Initial Coin Offering (ICO).
This is the fourth Ethereum cyber heist this month, for the second time hackers exploited the ICO to steal the precious crypto currencies.
Last week, a hacker stole $7 Million in Ethereum from CoinDash in just 3 minutes after the ICO launch, he tricked investors into sending ETH to the wrong address.
A few days ago, a hacker stole nearly $32 Million worth of Ethereum from wallet accounts by exploiting a critical flaw in the Parity’s Ethereum Wallet software. A third cyber heist of $1 Million worth of Ether and Bitcoins affected the currency exchange Bithumb earlier June.
Back to the present, Veritaseum confirmed the security breach, a hacker stole $8.4 Million in Ether (ETH) from its ICO on July 23. Further investigation is ongoing, it is still unclear which vulnerability was exploited by the hacker.
“We were hacked, possibly by a group. The hack seemed to be very sophisticated, but there’s at least one corporate partner that may have dropped the ball and be liable. We will let the lawyers sort that out if it goes that far.” said Veritaseum founder Reggie Middleton.
“The hacker(s) made away with $8.4M worth of tokens, and dumped all of them within a few hours into a heavy cacophony of demand. This is without the public knowing anything about our last traction.
I would like to make it known that we had the option to fork VERI, but chose not to. At the end of the day, the amount stolen was miniscule (less than 00.07%) although the dollar amount was quite material.”
Middleton speculates that an unnamed third-party company may be responsible for the attack. According to Middleton, due to the high demand of the VERI tokens during the ICO held over the weekend, the hacker first managed to steal those tokens and then immediately sold them to other buyers “within a few hours.”
The hacker first dumped the stolen funds into two separate Ethereum wallets and then moved them to other accounts.
The hacker has stolen 37,000 VERI tokens out of 100 Million in the cyber heist, this means that the event will not impact ICO investors.
“There are 100M tokens issued; the hackers stole about 37k. As I said, it is quite disconcerting, but it is not the end [of] the world. In the scheme of things, this is small,” added Middleton.
“The tokens were stolen from me, not the token buyers. I am not downplaying the seriousness of the heist either, but I am looking at the heist for what it is. A company that we use was compromised, the vulnerability was closed, and we are investigating whether we should move against that company or not.”
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