There's some info and speculation in these two (distinct) articles, but I'd love to know technical details of where the gaffs were.
eg. Was client software compromised? Did the multisig keyholders succumb to social engineering? Were the signers using airgapped machines / hardware devices?
"Bybit ETH multisig cold wallet just made a transfer to our warm wallet about 1 hr ago. It appears that this specific transaction was musked, all the signers saw the musked UI which showed the correct address and the URL was from @safe . However the signing message was to change the smart contract logic of our ETH cold wallet. This resulted Hacker took control of the specific ETH cold wallet we signed and transfered all ETH in the cold wallet to this unidentified address."
Unfortunately most hardware wallets can't interpret EVM smart contract transactions and asks you to sign a big binary blob that is supposed to match what you see on your computer screen (it's literally called blind signing). He said in the tweet and later on a live stream that they verified that the URL was correct, and there were several signers in different locations on different machines.
Logically the UI must have been manipulated for all of them, which I can think of a few different ways to do:
- The signing link was replaced somehow over whatever medium they sent it to each other, pointing to something that either looks like the original UI (perhaps IDN homograph domain) or is the actual site if it has some weakness that allows script injection to manipulate the page
- The server side was exploited to serve a manipulated page
- Client side malware that injects something in the browser to manipulate the page
- Some kind of network/DNS attack combined with mis-issued TLS certificate (or injected CA)
It points to some level of sophistication and long-term observation of their internal systems to know what the process looks like and devising an attack.
Will be interesting to read when/if they release a full analysis.
They could have used a hardware wallet like the Lattice1 from GridPlus, which actually shows the function parameters on a big screen instead of blind signing.
> According to crypto security firm Groom Lake, a Safe multisig wallet was deployed on Ethereum in 2019 and on the Base layer-2 in 2024 with identical transaction hashes. Ethereum’s alphanumeric transaction hashes are 64 characters long, so deploying the same smart contract transaction hash twice should be mathematically impossible.
> The same transaction hash appearing on both Ethereum and Base indicates an attacker could have found a way to make a single transaction valid on more than one network or could be reusing crypto wallet signatures or transaction data across networks, pseudonymous Groom Lake researcher Apollo said.
Oh, when I read this yesterday I assumed "musked" was a clever play on the idea that someone is tricked into agreeing to things against their interests.
A huge problem with signing EVM transactions using hardware wallets is that is common to be blind signing messages. The device has no knowledge of the SAFE EVM contract functions or any other context, it just asks you to sign an gobblygook opaque binary message so you may have no idea what's being signed, is my experience using multiple different vendor HW wallets. Not sure if that's what happened, but possible this type of problem contributed to the exploit. BTC TXs are simple enough that all HW wallets can basically display what's happening, but with turing-complete arbitrary computations in EVM this becomes very difficult.
In almost all cases EVM smart contract interaction looks like a function call which can be easily decoded into JSON if you know ABI.
HW wallet doesn't need to understand the contract logic, it just needs ABI, which is generally a simpler task. Also it can show the name of function you're calling as selector is a hash of a name.
Safe is a bit more complex as it also wraps it in EIP-712 message, but that can also be decoded in a systematic way.
https://x.com/tayvano_/status/1847877011462901915
This thread has some info about very similar past attacks, should give some insights into the level of sophistication that goes into something like that.
Cold usually means it needs multiple physical people to sign from offline devices to move it. Hot wallet usually is automated. Here it looks like the «hackers» found a way to trick enough people to sign this transaction
It could still be cold. "took control of the specific ETH cold wallet" sounds like stealing the physical hardware. Like someone stealing the vault key, or the HDCP master key getting leaked.
They could have gotten the recovery phrase off some paper, then imported it wherever. More likely than guessing the pin on a ledger with a short number of tries before wiping.
How on earth is it possible they can cover a 1.5B loss? Are they really sitting on that much profit, or is the goal to ponzi it out from here, MtGox style?
Bybit trading volume is in tens billions of dollars daily. Their comission rate for the retail traders is up to 10bp (0.1%). Even considering a huge part of that volume is coming from institutional players who enjoy significantly reduced commission rates, I think they're surely making few million dollars daily on comissions alone, maybe tens of millions in a good day. And besides comissions, they also have other sources of profit, like staking, crediting customers, and forced liquidations.
Being a crypto exchange in current market is very profitable. If the crypto itself does not collapse, I think it's totally possible for them to repay that sum in a year or less.
I'm nowhere near expert on any of the things below, but:
My gut tells me if an exchange makes as much money as you suggest, people involved in that exchange are making even more profit from the said exchange, otherwise they wouldn't engage. The whole thing being literally money out of thin air, it feels like a huge bubble that should inevitably burst bringing down _ a lot _ of collaterals with it.
These exchanges make an absurd amount of money. That amount of money is basically a decent quarter for Coinbase in fee revenue, and Bybit is smaller but it isn't that much smaller.
It sucks if you're Bybit, but they're going to have plenty of lenders happy to provide them liquidity while they make it all back.
I can understand why some FTX creditors are pissed that the exchange didn't start back up under new management. They would have actually been made whole, unlike the current situation where they're getting "repaid" but pegged to November 2022 valuations (i.e. the absolute bottom of the crypto bear market).
Bybit is one of the most used crypto exchanges and does >100M$ of revenue per month, growing fast.
If this isn't enough, I'm sure that every crypto VC would line up to buy a single digit % of their equity to cover up the hole. Crypto hosts the most profitable businesses in the world.
> Crypto hosts the most profitable businesses in the world.
Well, because the retail clients expect to get rich and don't mind paying 1% or so fees per exchange.
Similarly, the BTC future basis (the difference between the spot price and future price) on many exchanges around 10 to 5 years ago was easily 80% p.a. which you could realize by buying Bitcoin and selling the future. What happened there is that people going long Bitcoin with leverage essentially borrowed the money giving them that leverage at usurious rates (this implied rate is not usually displayed and thus invisible to your average retail client, but definitely very visible to the finance professionals moonlighting in crypto (such as Jane Street, Jump trading, and many others)).
Yes, the profits are insane in that business. Binance was raided for a similar amount, and paid it out easily. Mtgox was raided for ₿650k ($60B in today's money), and plans to return ₿140k to traders. However, I believe most Mtgox investors are better off this way because they were forced to hold onto their investments; otherwise, they would have sold at around $1,000 or so.
This loss is more than 5% of their holdings.. To me that implies the supposed benefit of crypto is nonexistent. If an institution is making so much money off your crypto assets that they can return 5% of them, they are a bank doing whatever it was that was so evil.
How on earth is it possible they can cover a 1.5B loss?
Easy! They give Binance an IOU in exchange for 1.5 billion BUSD which is just "minted" out of fresh new electrons. Neither of them has really lost anything. Everyone can carry on as if it never happened.
In the bizarro world of crypto, this is business as usual.
We don't know if they can cover it. All we know is a statement from their CEO.
Can we trust that? Suppose that ByBit couldn't cover the loss, and the CEO would honestly inform the world about it. What would happen? The crypto-equivalent of a bank run. So he would never say that.
I'm a huge crypto believer but I can admit that we don't have a serious system if a person can just transfer over $1.5B from a well known crypto cold wallet to different accounts with nothing flagging it and no way to reverse it.
In the face of the never-ending list of these kinds of events, the laughably impossible task of average nontechnical individuals protecting their own assets (and the consequence of total financial ruin when they fail to do so), the overwhelming number of and size of scams, rug pulls, fraud, outright Ponzi schemes, and on and on and on… what exactly is left to keep anyone a “huge believer”?
Put differently, it’s been seventeen years of constant and escalating mayhem. What would finally be enough to shake your faith?
> what exactly is left to keep anyone a “huge believer”?
I don't really engage in the ponzibucks part and don't touch exchanges except to on and off-ramp, and use crypto to pay for things like hosting, seedboxes, or other services I might not necessarily want my debit card directly attached to.
I like sending vendors $100 and spending $0.00005 in transaction fees and knowing that they'll get $100 (or $99 with some 3rd party integration like Coinbase Commerce) versus spending $100, of which Stripe gets $5 of and the vendor only sees ~$95 if I don't feel like I need the protections of a card, which is frequent but not all the time.
Crypto fits a niche in my life well, despite the wider crypto world having dumb controversies. Just like my HSBC bank account fits a niche well, despite HSBC's wikipedia page being ~50% controversy section by word count.
> What would finally be enough to shake your faith?
Permanent and major market crashes is the only thing I can think of .
After the last crash a lot of fraud and incompetence got out because they couldn’t stay solvent, stuff like Celsius or FTX etc got exposed only because of the crash we had in 21/22.
It will take a few crashes, like that, until then scams or incompetence like this incident will not make people loose their money.
Few crashes, then most believers will loose their savings then the faith will shatter not until then.
Most people are after all investing in crypto because it goes up and not because they believe in decentralized currencies. As long as they hear how someone is making money on crypto they will keep believing no matter how many meme coins pull the rug, or exchanges fail or pig butchering or myriad of other scams come to light
> what exactly is left to keep anyone a “huge believer”?
Bias. I expect believers to have earned a profit or still hold significant quantities of crypto assets.
But in their favor, trust in any currency is the foundation of its value. States create it by collecting taxes and paying employees. Crypto currencies generally lack that heavy weight central authority, so they kind of have to believe to the point where they get burned.
You like decentralized money without laws and accountability, but would like to have a central thing (TBD) that is accountable and respect laws? How would that work?
1. Upgrade protocol to include protections for well known cold wallets held by exchanges (ex: API call has to be made to the exchange's security endpoint to validate each transaction out of the wallet. Exchange staff would need to manually allowlist large transactions before they are transmitted).
2. Decentralized voting on reversal of transactions (90-95%+ vote needed to reverse to avoid 51% attacks)
I think the move is less having a central thing and more advancing wallet and multisig technology. ByBit was pretty reckless by using a simple majority multisig to hold $1.5b. At that level you should probably have a few speed bumps. Like, maybe a majority of signatures allows you to make a proposal, but you can only accept the proposal after a couple hours, which would give you the chance to see the malicious transaction and bail on it.
Something like that would probably be overkill for individuals, but most people would definitely benefit from some added on chain bureaucracy regarding how their accounts are managed. And yes, for many this would lead to a system that isn't notably less centralized than the traditional banking system. But people would at least have a choice as to where their wallets gets to sit on the bureaucracy <> complete freedom spectrum. And even if they end up closer to the bureaucracy end, they'd have a lot more flexibility and lower administrative fees than what they currently have.
Right on. My bank calls me every time I send money out. And I'm talking like $50. I used to find it annoying, but now I'm blown away every financial system doesn't...
On the one hand, I understand banks attempting to protect customers and limit liability, on the other hand, frankly I have better things to do with my time than spend 30 minutes waiting in a phone queue because I had the audacity to go on holiday and attempt to spend $20 on ice cream.
There should be something like a "finalizing transaction", which both the sender and receiver need to sign after the first transaction has been mined, i.e. like an in-built escrow. If it's not signed by both, then funds are returned. This wouldn't protect against key leakage, but in this case, the tx was signed by accident. This would also protect against sending to wrong address.
There are cryptocurrencies in which transactions must be signed by both sender and receiver, such as those implementing the pure Mimblewimble protocol.
> Both the sender and receiver need to sign after the first transaction has been mined
That makes no sense; miners don't mine transactions unless they're guaranteed to be valid. All signing must be done before transactions are even published. Otherwise one could DoD-attack the network by having it forward tons of invalid transactions.
You’d mine the first transaction which is a nominal value but the rest of the transaction won’t get mined until that first transaction is signed by both parties indicating acceptance. You could even break it down into an arbitrarily multi-stage process where the next stage is exponentially larger more money (i.e. transfer $100, then transfer $1000, then $1000, etc). This would make the accident “hit a button and lose a B right away” much harder to pull off. Of course, in this case I don’t know that it would help as I believe the attacked party signed approval to change the contract itself.
Can someone even explain what Bybit is actually about? I searched around when the hack was announced, but I'm very confused. Mostly what I saw said "scam" on it.
This isn't your run-of-the-mill Coinbase style exchange, right?
It's the second largest crypto exchange by volume globally, behind Binance. Specialized in derivatives but they have lots of regular retail products that you might find at Coinbase. Basically like a bigger version of Coinbase from Asia.
I have no idea how crypto exchanges work. Could someone ELI5 some of this? I have questions:
Did the cold storage wallet contain users' ETH? That seems implied by "Can Cover Loss".
If so, why does a crypto exchange hold users' ETH in a wallet that can execute transactions without said user's authorization/password for each transaction. Doesn't even Facebook require entering a password every time to change certain profile settings?
Or maybe more generally, why does there need to be such a large cold-storage wallet to run an exchange?
Also how or why would they have the assets to be able to cover this?
There's some other seemingly conflicting info I found in searches for Bybit:
- Bybit is not legal in Canada. Bybit is restricted in Canada and other jurisdictions, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Singapore.
- Bybit originates from Singapore, a global hub for cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. Singapore has a favorable regulatory environment for cryptocurrencies, which has attracted many exchanges to establish their headquarters there.
- There's also a mix of results where some say Bybit is safe/secure and others saying they aren't (irrespective of this event). This story seems to indicate that they had measures to make it safe, but it didn't save them.
A crypto exchange WazirX was hacked for ~$300M, roughly 50% of the users fund gone.
There is no action on the CEO since the hack in July 2024. He sits in Dubai. He just got a nod from Supreme Court of SG to just average out the funds and distribute it among the users.
No action has been initiated against the company/ceo for losing the fund. He is geared up to launch another company/exchange.
I spent several years pointing out to my last employer that every former employee could have walked off with secrets that allowed them access to our backends. The were already slowly working on hardening write access but read access was still being worked on a couple months before I left, when I got to write about half of the last mile code for the user facing bits.
This is not a unique experience by any means. I’ve seen this sort of thing enough to pay attention when acquaintances bitch about it too.
Are these business-owned exchanges and managed wallets not fundamentally incompatible with making guarantees of security? Is anyone doing it the "right" way and what does the right way even look like?
> have a wallet, work at bybit
> understand backdoor
> steal money from your account, some from others
> bybit pays you back
> still have money you stole
Bybit CEO Ben Zhou wrote on X that a hacker "took control of the specific ETH cold wallet and transferred all the ETH in the cold wallet to this unidentified address."
"Control" has a specific meaning under UCC Article 12, which was ratified in 2022 and is slowly being adopted by U.S. states. It links some rights to control/possession of keys, even if a blockchain asset may have been stolen before being sold, https://www.clearygottlieb.com//news-and-insights/publicatio...
> Article 12 – dealing directly with the acquisition and disposition of interests (including security interests) in “controllable electronic records,” which would include Bitcoin, Ether, and a variety of other digital assets ... a good faith purchaser for value who obtains control (a “qualifying purchaser”) takes its interest free of conflicting property claims... Control under Article 12 is designed to be a technology-neutral functional equivalent of “possession.” It generally encompasses circumstances when a party has the “private key”
I think (I assume but could be wrong) in the average CEO X-tweet "control" likely only means 'control' nobody was reading through UCC Article 12 while drafting this message
As in: "The hacker gained access to" "The hacker took charge of" "The hacker assumed authority over"
It describes the legal status of stolen cryptocurrency changing after the first sale. This HN story is about stolen cryptocurrency. In particular:
> The wallet has sold around $200 million worth of stETH so far
If some of those sales took place within jurisdiction of a U.S. state that has ratified UCC Article 12, then the buyer of the stolen cryptocurrency is now the new legal owner.
It is important everyone is thinking real hard about how this is different from traditional theft: there is no way to actually prove the operators didn't just steal everything themselves vs actual real hack theft.
When even professional companies that have billions of dollars under management can't securely manage their crypto assets, how likely is it that individuals can?
I wouldn't be surprised if Bybit cuts a deal with the hacker to return the funds. There's no way that $1.46 billion of marked ETH can be liquidated and off-ramped to fiat.
Exchanges will blacklist the addresses that hold the hacked ETH. They won't be able to deposit, or if they can deposit, the ETH will be frozen by the exchange.
The current deletion is for reasons that include lack of NCORP (Notability (organizations and companies)). And they back that in turn by saying that the sources are weak.
I understand on one side that they don’t want every company in the world to have a Wikipedia page. Because the point of Wikipedia is not to promote or legitimise every company in the world.
But you’d think that at the point where widely covered news of a hack leading to a loss of a billion dollars and a half, would be reason to have a Wikipedia article about it.
And instead they went and deleted the article today.
There’s probably additional editing of the page itself that you can dig into the history of if you want to see what happened during the past couple of days leading up to the page being deleted again.
For me, I’ll file this under Wikipedia Editors gonna Edit. They have all kinds of edit wars and page deletions going on all the time in the background that the rest of us mostly don’t even notice most of the time. And all over I’m still happy with Wikipedia for all of the information it has collected within.
It could be resurrected if there are multiple news stories making it notable for being hacked. It would have to be rewritten, though, to give it substantially different content.
They're basically saying "nah, that's spam". So when it was recreated yet again, of course it was speedily terminated with prejudice because it just looks like another spam attempt.
Not sure if there's a rule against covering news stories. Seems like we wouldn't want an article on every news event (I'm pretty sure there is a rule against that), but Crowdstrike got an article.
Who says ByBit can cover the loss? The article title says that but the article quotes do not. The CEO only said that their other cold wallets are intact and that withdrawals remain normal.
Bybit claims to be regulated by the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority of Dubai.[1]
But the lookup page at VARA says they only have "In-principle approval", not a full license. "Applicants holding an IPA are strictly prohibited from initiating operations, conducting any virtual asset activities, or servicing clients until they have obtained their full VASP licence from VARA."
>Bybit CEO Ben Zhou wrote on X that a hacker "took control of the specific ETH cold wallet and transferred all the ETH in the cold wallet to this unidentified address."
Have to wait for a post-mortem, but there was some speculation from Ben earlier in his spaces.
They used a gnosis safe which is a smart contract multi-sig wallet that is pretty much the gold standard for Ethereum.
They believed that all of the signers' pcs were hacked and that the UI for signing was staged with a fake element to make it appear like a normal transfer.
They were signing with hardware wallets, but it's hard to verify what you're signing from a ledger typically.
What they ended up signing instead was an upgrade to the smart contract giving control of the gnosis safe to the hacker who then drained it.
I found it funny that the idea of blockchain, which, the system trusts no single entity but trusts transaction consensus, yet one trusts a single entity who holds your wallet and risk of losing if they get hacked while there's no mediators/regulators to revert the transaction
My understand is that the original transaction was a small fraction of the total balance of ETH in the wallet. How then were they able to liquidate the entire ETH wallet?
When you decentralize finance like this what becomes okay to do according to system rules is exactly what is possible to do according to system rules. We don't have humans in that loop anymore to enforce moral judgments about what constitutes unlawful theft (except for 1 or 2 rare "hard-forks" of various blockchains to reverse devastating transactions).
I feel bad for people who lose large volumes of cryptocurrency to malicious actors in the same way I feel bad for people who lose large volumes of real money to a casino.
It is 2025 now and we all know that anyone who can somehow get your private-key to whatever blockchain backed assets you have "owns" those assets just as much as you do and they are permitted to take them under the rules of the system so whatever you do do not lose that key.
There is no higher arbiter of justice in this space so use it at your own risk.
Being doomed to spending millions of real dollars litigating to buy a trash dump full of used diapers and toxic waste, just to dig around in it looking for a hard disk drive for the rest of your life, seems to be a particularly satisfying Sisyphean form of justice.
In this case yes - everything went by the design and law of the underlying code. There was no exploited bug or vulnerability flaw besides human laziness here.
1) Their multi-signature wallet signing employees lazily clicked through in unison to approve a new smart contract without examining the contents to see if it was unusual.
2) Bad security architecture to keep too much in a single wallet that wasn't properly kept cold. There should have been a few fully cold wallets, that only rarely transact with mostly-cold intermediary "airlock" wallets which are also separated from the exchange operations and wallets. The signers also need to be different combinations of people for each of those wallets - preferably some of those signers being additionally liable 3rd party technical experts.
I see this quote repeated here often, but working in the industry I've never heard it said unironically by any of my peers or thought leaders in the space. Best I can tell it is a sort of lazy straw man repeated by skeptics. Does it have an origin?
The original idea with crypto was that the "code" was so strong, it removed the need for physical banks, tellers, FDIC, law enforcement, etc. The theory was, we can have everything the banking system has, but cheaper, because the only way to steal money was to break the crypto itself, hence "code is law".
The industry cannot appeal to the protections of law enforcement, civil tort, and other features of the regulated banking system, without simultaneously undermining the "crypto" part. If you're going to summon authorities when hackers hack, you're no better off than if you just acted like any other bank and stored the client's balance in an excel sheet.
These are not hacks, just like Mtgox, Celsius, FTX etc etc etc were not hacks. These are crypto insiders supporting the stablecoin so they can print and set a floor on prices before/during potential mass sell off events.
The entirety of the cryptocurrency world is so obviously a "Chesterton's Fence" situation.
Every pseudo-intellectual thinks that the fiscal world is "too complicated" and they're going to "simplify" it by making some token, only for people to realize that the monetary world is just complicated, and they have to reinvent everything that already existed in the traditional banking system.
I had to do some work on an ACH system a couple years ago [1], and I read through a large chunk of the ACH standard, which was about 800 pages. It's easy to see and hear that and think "that's way too complicated, what could possibly be so hard about money transfers that necessitates an 700 page specification??", but as I read it and saw how many edge cases it took into account, it was easy to see why it got so huge. It turns out that dealing with money is just a really hard problem at scale.
I fell for the cryptocurrency hype of 2021, and I will fully acknowledge that that came out of a complete lack of understanding of how fiscal systems work. I wish everyone else would just grow up already.
[1] Usually disclaimer: not hard to find my work history, it's not hidden, but I ask that you do not post anything about it (or at least any proper nouns about it) here.
For what it’s worth, I’m a “crypto believer” and I have never considered ease of use to be one of its selling points.
What you are describing are the systems of power which create a stable financial system. That is, one where you can put a nickel into a bank account and expect it to be there in a year or a hundred years.
That indeed requires a complex web of power structures, because its top line goal is to be stable and dependable. And stability within a complex landscape requires an equally complex network of power.
Crypto provides the exact opposite value: it cannot be controlled, no matter how robust your power structure is. It can be insured, at a significant cost, but not controlled.
That means in the face of even totalitarian powers someone could still move crypto across any boundary that is permeable to information, which it turns out is a set that roughly approximates the set of all boundaries.
This is a terrible way to pay for candy bars, because candy bars are not worth insuring.
But what I think the crypto opponents miss is that there is a set of transactions—some criminal, some legal, some immoral, some righteous—which cannot be made in a state controlled financial systems.
And that these transactions are what gives crypto value as a currency.
To me, where I would like the debate to go is not “is crypto a scam?” but “how does society protect people from the violence facilitated by crypto?”
Yes, financial “violence”, which can be insured against, but also real violence: human trafficking, extortion, etc.
We anarchists sometimes like to pretend that without rulers we will be freed to care for each other. But in the shadow of a history of violence, there will be more violence too.
And the “crypto is a scam” argument I fear is a red herring that distracts from this, the real issue.
Power structures can absolutely control crypto. They can make it illegal - it won't eradicate it altogether (see: war on drugs), but it will severely decrease its influence. No one is bragging about investing their retirement savings into cocaine, and Paypal does not offer it to me either.
Or if government is smarter, they can slowly gain control over it. Allow trading traceable currencies via official channels, but with good KYC measures. Do not allow fully anonymous systems. Go after mixers. Prosecute exchanges which do not verify their customers. Once there are plenty of government-sanctioned exchanges in the country, there will be little incentive to create unsanctioned ones, and someone with coins that were marked "North Korean-originated" won't be able to spend them in the country.
> Crypto provides the exact opposite value: it cannot be controlled, no matter how robust your power structure is. It can be insured, at a significant cost, but not controlled.
This is such a naive claim parroted by crypto enthusiasts. Lots of criminal things can't be 'controlled' (e.g. stopping people murdering, stealing, etc.), but there are consequences if you do them.
Crypto could easily be controlled by laws or punitive taxes. KYC is a step in that direction. But still this claim keeps coming out. All they need to do is control the off-ramps.
It's like the one "but, but, there will only ever be a fixed amount of BTC, so it's valuable!". There will only ever be a fixed amount of my turds, but I don't see them up for auction. It also doesn't explain why BTC is the valuable one but not all the clones (spoiler: it's the brand name).
It's easier to just parrot some grifter's justifications than actually thinking for yourself I guess.
If you read the original bitcoin paper, it complains about bank centralization and “issues” with traditional finance for a not-insignificant amount of it, and presents cryptocurrency as a solution.
I will admit I used a bit of shorthand, but the paper is providing a “simple” solution to a “complex” problem.
> The wallet in question appears to have sent 401,346 ETH ($1.1 billion) as well as several other iterations of staked ether (stETH) to a fresh wallet, which is now liquidating mETH and stETH on decentralized exchanges, etherscan shows. The wallet has sold around $200 million worth of stETH so far.
If you showed me a paragraph like this a decade ago and told me it was from 2025, I would have a difficult time believing you.
Crypto shenanigans were happening in 2015, even as far back as 2010, so I would have to absolutely believed you to hear that it continues happening, as crypto is a fundamentally unstable platform.
It's a cold wallet which means it should never be connected to the internet, so not entirely online, but yes - these are the wild wild west times of the internet. Imagine how easy it was to go into a bank shoot some people and get out with money, and doing it like, daily? monthly? Today it's not possible.
It's definitely embarrassing that people losing their shirts in crypto didn't see it coming. It's bad that people think a zero sum game is worth playing against incumbents. The marks aren't the worst part, though. Everyone promoting memecoins and utility-free cryptocurrency in general is either ignorant or just a bad person with a warped idea of success. Personal money accumulation is a sad goal compared to actual wealth creation. The parasites who push crypto on the hopeful proto-bag holders are destroying the prosperity that supports them.
"Bybit CEO Ben Zhou wrote on X that a hacker "took control of the specific ETH cold wallet and transferred all the ETH in the cold wallet to this unidentified address."
From the article. Not that I endorse crypto, in fact I despise it. But at least per this statement, it seems to have been handled offline. How a hacker could get access to this is another story to unpack.
edit: I guess this is the story that "unpacks". One more reason to not believe in crypto.
Society has devolved a bit when not long ago a heist like this would involve sieging Nakatomi Plaza, now it takes just finding a bug in someone's defective Python codes.
It has been this way since the dawn of electronic banking. I once had complete access to all digital wallets for the Seattle metro, which I gained by looking at two cards and noticing the numbers were incrementing. Even with all of the flaws of electronic transactions, it's still better than walking to the bank and hoping a check won't bounce.
You don't even have to break into a wierd high-tech vault to get an unreasonably slow (or fast) billion-dollar progress bar with a snazzy custom UI toolkit these days. Not sure if technology or inflation is most to blame!
yes, this part won't play well in the movie: it takes just as long to transfer a billion as a dollar; the progress bar won't allow any time to build suspense... will they finish in time? cuts between parallel timelines...
not related to the current western market, but countries like Romania pre EU had a huge surplus of soviet-educated young people and no jobs. This definitely increased their involvement with "informal" economies for some time.
They can't really do anything when it comes to crypto in comparison to actual money. There's a reason why countries like Iran, North Korea, and Russia are resorting to stealing crypto by various means.
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive / snarky / tropey comments here. It leads to generic / repetitive / nasty discussion, and we're hoping to avoid that here.
The genius behind crypto is that it's not just the extremely gullible. I know a fair number of really smart people, academics even, that have bought into the cryptocurrency hype.
It has this kind of veil of "high techness" to it that is appealing to smart-but-uninformed people (like me in 2021). I'm embarrassed that I fell for it, but on the bright side it does make me a bit more sympathetic for other people who also fell for it.
> The genius behind crypto is that it's not just the extremely gullible.
I don't know about you, but I barely follow cryptocurrency news, and I've still been hearing about major players getting "hacked" several times a year for over a decade.
Either it's Mt Gox or FTX or The DAO or Bitfinex or QuadrigaCX or Terra/Luna or rug-pull meme coins or dollar-backed coins that actually aren't or any of a dozen other things.
Anyone who isn't being extremely careful to avoid scams, given the constant drumbeat of reports about how you have to be extremely careful to avoid scams when dealing with cryptocurrency, is pretty gullible.
Thinking you can store your crypto with some 3rd party that _definitely_ won't get hacked (or """hacked"""), also thinking your crypto won't become worthless from a singular unusual event. Actually the most gullible are the people who think of cryptocurrency as an "investment" XD
So salty! And yet...How's ETH Classic doing? It was the right move at the time to fork. And pretty obviously would be the wrong move today.
For context, guluarte is referring to a moderately contentious hardfork done by the Ethereum developers and mining community to reverse TheDAO Hack in 2016 or so. The stakes were much larger then -- Ethereum was newer, not yet battle tested, and TheDAO had something like 10% of all ETH in it.
A fork was formed -- "ETH Classic" -- ticker ETC -- which did not reverse the DAO hack, and you can see from valuations that the public preferred the reversal.
I mean, the public comprised of the developers of Ethereum who had significant financial incentive to pretend the hack did not happen and to forever publicize their chain of history.
Old man yells at cloud vibes every time a crypto post comes on HN.
No interesting discussions ever. Just axes being sharpened and people who dislike it taking the opportunity to gloat. I would characterize the pro crypto people but I don’t see any. Which is said because over the last 5 years I have found crypto, bitcoin, and stable coins to be extremely useful when helping family members in emerging markets.
But hey it’s all trash, the west doesn’t need it so let’s all dance on its grave.. i guess we will keep dancing for another 15 years.
a related blog from Trail of Bits about the opsec failure of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43140754
Currently discussed here:
The $1.5B Bybit Hack - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43140754
Normally we'd merge that one hither but it looks like that article has more background and the thread is (therefore) better.
There's some info and speculation in these two (distinct) articles, but I'd love to know technical details of where the gaffs were.
eg. Was client software compromised? Did the multisig keyholders succumb to social engineering? Were the signers using airgapped machines / hardware devices?
https://archive.ph/YMZrq
https://blockworks.co/news/bybit-hack-raises-security-questi...
Here is what the CEO wrote on X:
"Bybit ETH multisig cold wallet just made a transfer to our warm wallet about 1 hr ago. It appears that this specific transaction was musked, all the signers saw the musked UI which showed the correct address and the URL was from @safe . However the signing message was to change the smart contract logic of our ETH cold wallet. This resulted Hacker took control of the specific ETH cold wallet we signed and transfered all ETH in the cold wallet to this unidentified address."
[yes, it says 'musked', assuming they meant masked. @safe is https://safe.global/wallet]
Unfortunately most hardware wallets can't interpret EVM smart contract transactions and asks you to sign a big binary blob that is supposed to match what you see on your computer screen (it's literally called blind signing). He said in the tweet and later on a live stream that they verified that the URL was correct, and there were several signers in different locations on different machines.
Logically the UI must have been manipulated for all of them, which I can think of a few different ways to do:
- The signing link was replaced somehow over whatever medium they sent it to each other, pointing to something that either looks like the original UI (perhaps IDN homograph domain) or is the actual site if it has some weakness that allows script injection to manipulate the page
- The server side was exploited to serve a manipulated page
- Client side malware that injects something in the browser to manipulate the page
- Some kind of network/DNS attack combined with mis-issued TLS certificate (or injected CA)
It points to some level of sophistication and long-term observation of their internal systems to know what the process looks like and devising an attack.
Will be interesting to read when/if they release a full analysis.
They could have used a hardware wallet like the Lattice1 from GridPlus, which actually shows the function parameters on a big screen instead of blind signing.
Is it possible that this was an inside job?
One of the links says the following:
> According to crypto security firm Groom Lake, a Safe multisig wallet was deployed on Ethereum in 2019 and on the Base layer-2 in 2024 with identical transaction hashes. Ethereum’s alphanumeric transaction hashes are 64 characters long, so deploying the same smart contract transaction hash twice should be mathematically impossible.
> The same transaction hash appearing on both Ethereum and Base indicates an attacker could have found a way to make a single transaction valid on more than one network or could be reusing crypto wallet signatures or transaction data across networks, pseudonymous Groom Lake researcher Apollo said.
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Are we sure he didn't mean the transaction got DOGEd?
Oh, when I read this yesterday I assumed "musked" was a clever play on the idea that someone is tricked into agreeing to things against their interests.
A huge problem with signing EVM transactions using hardware wallets is that is common to be blind signing messages. The device has no knowledge of the SAFE EVM contract functions or any other context, it just asks you to sign an gobblygook opaque binary message so you may have no idea what's being signed, is my experience using multiple different vendor HW wallets. Not sure if that's what happened, but possible this type of problem contributed to the exploit. BTC TXs are simple enough that all HW wallets can basically display what's happening, but with turing-complete arbitrary computations in EVM this becomes very difficult.
In almost all cases EVM smart contract interaction looks like a function call which can be easily decoded into JSON if you know ABI.
HW wallet doesn't need to understand the contract logic, it just needs ABI, which is generally a simpler task. Also it can show the name of function you're calling as selector is a hash of a name.
Safe is a bit more complex as it also wraps it in EIP-712 message, but that can also be decoded in a systematic way.
> with turing-complete arbitrary computations in EVM this becomes very difficult.
I have very limited knowledge about EVM, but those computations are bounded by gas, right? Evaluating them is a finite process.
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Thanks for spelling this out, the explanation makes a lot of sense.
You'd think they could at least show a blockie representing the contract, or reputational party who cryptographically vouched for it.
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https://x.com/tayvano_/status/1847877011462901915 This thread has some info about very similar past attacks, should give some insights into the level of sophistication that goes into something like that.
This was interesting, thanks!
It's obviously not a cold wallet if it's connected to the exchange.
It's also not reassuring that the CEO claims cold wallets are safe and secure, just after losing 1.46B
Cold usually means it needs multiple physical people to sign from offline devices to move it. Hot wallet usually is automated. Here it looks like the «hackers» found a way to trick enough people to sign this transaction
Or the cold wallet was, at best, room temperature.
It could still be cold. "took control of the specific ETH cold wallet" sounds like stealing the physical hardware. Like someone stealing the vault key, or the HDCP master key getting leaked.
Yes. This sounds like a variant of “rubber hose decryption.” “We beat him with a sock full of doorknobs until he gave us the device.”
Perhaps their servers have cryogenic cooling
They could have gotten the recovery phrase off some paper, then imported it wherever. More likely than guessing the pin on a ledger with a short number of tries before wiping.
Yeah this makes no sense whatsoever.
> [The hacker] took control of the specific ETH cold wallet and transferred all the ETH in the cold wallet to this unidentified address.
Did the hacker physically break into their office or what?
Possibly yes
Or some part of their system failed and the key was compromised without them realising it (like the Debian insecure keys debacle or whatever)
How on earth is it possible they can cover a 1.5B loss? Are they really sitting on that much profit, or is the goal to ponzi it out from here, MtGox style?
Bybit trading volume is in tens billions of dollars daily. Their comission rate for the retail traders is up to 10bp (0.1%). Even considering a huge part of that volume is coming from institutional players who enjoy significantly reduced commission rates, I think they're surely making few million dollars daily on comissions alone, maybe tens of millions in a good day. And besides comissions, they also have other sources of profit, like staking, crediting customers, and forced liquidations.
Being a crypto exchange in current market is very profitable. If the crypto itself does not collapse, I think it's totally possible for them to repay that sum in a year or less.
I'm nowhere near expert on any of the things below, but: My gut tells me if an exchange makes as much money as you suggest, people involved in that exchange are making even more profit from the said exchange, otherwise they wouldn't engage. The whole thing being literally money out of thin air, it feels like a huge bubble that should inevitably burst bringing down _ a lot _ of collaterals with it.
</speculation>
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ByBit's trading volume is almost certainly largely wash trading. Most unregulated crypto exchanges are rife with wash trading.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w30783
Most of the trading is not done by retail traders but at much lower fees than that, if not being paid (market makers). I just can't make it add up.
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In crypto, there is the concept of the "fictional reserve" which can be used in situations such as this.
If it's big enough you can even get the devs to fork the blockchain to reset things (see The DAO)
It's not that crypto folks don't want some protection from hacks or fraud - the just think it should only be for the rich.
These exchanges make an absurd amount of money. That amount of money is basically a decent quarter for Coinbase in fee revenue, and Bybit is smaller but it isn't that much smaller.
It sucks if you're Bybit, but they're going to have plenty of lenders happy to provide them liquidity while they make it all back.
I can understand why some FTX creditors are pissed that the exchange didn't start back up under new management. They would have actually been made whole, unlike the current situation where they're getting "repaid" but pegged to November 2022 valuations (i.e. the absolute bottom of the crypto bear market).
FXCM forex trading broker covered a similar sized loss of client money (not hack) when EUR/CHF was unpegged in 2015.
Since it was a profitable broker business, another bigger broker gave them the money to plug the loss in exchange for taking over the business.
Bybit is one of the most used crypto exchanges and does >100M$ of revenue per month, growing fast.
If this isn't enough, I'm sure that every crypto VC would line up to buy a single digit % of their equity to cover up the hole. Crypto hosts the most profitable businesses in the world.
> Crypto hosts the most profitable businesses in the world.
Well, because the retail clients expect to get rich and don't mind paying 1% or so fees per exchange.
Similarly, the BTC future basis (the difference between the spot price and future price) on many exchanges around 10 to 5 years ago was easily 80% p.a. which you could realize by buying Bitcoin and selling the future. What happened there is that people going long Bitcoin with leverage essentially borrowed the money giving them that leverage at usurious rates (this implied rate is not usually displayed and thus invisible to your average retail client, but definitely very visible to the finance professionals moonlighting in crypto (such as Jane Street, Jump trading, and many others)).
Crypto use case: ripping off retail.
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Yes, the profits are insane in that business. Binance was raided for a similar amount, and paid it out easily. Mtgox was raided for ₿650k ($60B in today's money), and plans to return ₿140k to traders. However, I believe most Mtgox investors are better off this way because they were forced to hold onto their investments; otherwise, they would have sold at around $1,000 or so.
This loss is more than 5% of their holdings.. To me that implies the supposed benefit of crypto is nonexistent. If an institution is making so much money off your crypto assets that they can return 5% of them, they are a bank doing whatever it was that was so evil.
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I had read they got loans and antcipate paying them back qith recovered proceeds. Interest they could cover with on going operations.
How on earth is it possible they can cover a 1.5B loss?
Easy! They give Binance an IOU in exchange for 1.5 billion BUSD which is just "minted" out of fresh new electrons. Neither of them has really lost anything. Everyone can carry on as if it never happened.
In the bizarro world of crypto, this is business as usual.
Binance doesn't mint BUSD, BUSD is emitted by Paxos, which is an american licensed company.
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How it it different from what banks do? (Except for a central regulator.)
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We don't know if they can cover it. All we know is a statement from their CEO.
Can we trust that? Suppose that ByBit couldn't cover the loss, and the CEO would honestly inform the world about it. What would happen? The crypto-equivalent of a bank run. So he would never say that.
bybit makes $100 million a month and has substantial excess reserves
A lot more money than the majority of AI startups and it is creating jobs rather than purposefully destroying them.
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Fractional reserve helps.
I'm a huge crypto believer but I can admit that we don't have a serious system if a person can just transfer over $1.5B from a well known crypto cold wallet to different accounts with nothing flagging it and no way to reverse it.
In the face of the never-ending list of these kinds of events, the laughably impossible task of average nontechnical individuals protecting their own assets (and the consequence of total financial ruin when they fail to do so), the overwhelming number of and size of scams, rug pulls, fraud, outright Ponzi schemes, and on and on and on… what exactly is left to keep anyone a “huge believer”?
Put differently, it’s been seventeen years of constant and escalating mayhem. What would finally be enough to shake your faith?
> what exactly is left to keep anyone a “huge believer”?
I don't really engage in the ponzibucks part and don't touch exchanges except to on and off-ramp, and use crypto to pay for things like hosting, seedboxes, or other services I might not necessarily want my debit card directly attached to.
I like sending vendors $100 and spending $0.00005 in transaction fees and knowing that they'll get $100 (or $99 with some 3rd party integration like Coinbase Commerce) versus spending $100, of which Stripe gets $5 of and the vendor only sees ~$95 if I don't feel like I need the protections of a card, which is frequent but not all the time.
Crypto fits a niche in my life well, despite the wider crypto world having dumb controversies. Just like my HSBC bank account fits a niche well, despite HSBC's wikipedia page being ~50% controversy section by word count.
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> What would finally be enough to shake your faith?
Permanent and major market crashes is the only thing I can think of .
After the last crash a lot of fraud and incompetence got out because they couldn’t stay solvent, stuff like Celsius or FTX etc got exposed only because of the crash we had in 21/22.
It will take a few crashes, like that, until then scams or incompetence like this incident will not make people loose their money.
Few crashes, then most believers will loose their savings then the faith will shatter not until then.
Most people are after all investing in crypto because it goes up and not because they believe in decentralized currencies. As long as they hear how someone is making money on crypto they will keep believing no matter how many meme coins pull the rug, or exchanges fail or pig butchering or myriad of other scams come to light
> what exactly is left to keep anyone a “huge believer”?
Bias. I expect believers to have earned a profit or still hold significant quantities of crypto assets.
But in their favor, trust in any currency is the foundation of its value. States create it by collecting taxes and paying employees. Crypto currencies generally lack that heavy weight central authority, so they kind of have to believe to the point where they get burned.
Maybe when it stops escalating and getting bigger and bigger and continually growing over time?
In 17 years, USD holders got hacked for 65% of their money (based on gold, or eggs, prices). At the same time, btc holders ... you know.
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Movement of funds from one sovereign nation's jurisdiction to another is important when one jurisdiction is in crisis or restricting capital flows.
> What would finally be enough to shake your faith?
Crypto scams run by top government officials? Oh, wait...
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They've seen other people make loads of money (or maybe made a load themselves) and are still in the game hoping to make loads more.
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My faith would shake when scams, rugs, fraud, and ponzis completely stop outside of crypto.
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You like decentralized money without laws and accountability, but would like to have a central thing (TBD) that is accountable and respect laws? How would that work?
I'm not too sure but few things come to mind:
1. Upgrade protocol to include protections for well known cold wallets held by exchanges (ex: API call has to be made to the exchange's security endpoint to validate each transaction out of the wallet. Exchange staff would need to manually allowlist large transactions before they are transmitted).
2. Decentralized voting on reversal of transactions (90-95%+ vote needed to reverse to avoid 51% attacks)
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I think the move is less having a central thing and more advancing wallet and multisig technology. ByBit was pretty reckless by using a simple majority multisig to hold $1.5b. At that level you should probably have a few speed bumps. Like, maybe a majority of signatures allows you to make a proposal, but you can only accept the proposal after a couple hours, which would give you the chance to see the malicious transaction and bail on it.
Something like that would probably be overkill for individuals, but most people would definitely benefit from some added on chain bureaucracy regarding how their accounts are managed. And yes, for many this would lead to a system that isn't notably less centralized than the traditional banking system. But people would at least have a choice as to where their wallets gets to sit on the bureaucracy <> complete freedom spectrum. And even if they end up closer to the bureaucracy end, they'd have a lot more flexibility and lower administrative fees than what they currently have.
> let's reinvent the banking system except worse in every way
Right on. My bank calls me every time I send money out. And I'm talking like $50. I used to find it annoying, but now I'm blown away every financial system doesn't...
On the one hand, I understand banks attempting to protect customers and limit liability, on the other hand, frankly I have better things to do with my time than spend 30 minutes waiting in a phone queue because I had the audacity to go on holiday and attempt to spend $20 on ice cream.
Those all sound like stated objectives of crypto.
Code is law, no?
Solutions have existed for years (eg Gnosis Safe), they just aren’t being used by that exchange.
Bybit was quite literally using Gnosis Safe for the compromised wallet.
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Can’t tell if you’re trolling here or not, but good one either way!
There should be something like a "finalizing transaction", which both the sender and receiver need to sign after the first transaction has been mined, i.e. like an in-built escrow. If it's not signed by both, then funds are returned. This wouldn't protect against key leakage, but in this case, the tx was signed by accident. This would also protect against sending to wrong address.
There are cryptocurrencies in which transactions must be signed by both sender and receiver, such as those implementing the pure Mimblewimble protocol.
> Both the sender and receiver need to sign after the first transaction has been mined
That makes no sense; miners don't mine transactions unless they're guaranteed to be valid. All signing must be done before transactions are even published. Otherwise one could DoD-attack the network by having it forward tons of invalid transactions.
You’d mine the first transaction which is a nominal value but the rest of the transaction won’t get mined until that first transaction is signed by both parties indicating acceptance. You could even break it down into an arbitrarily multi-stage process where the next stage is exponentially larger more money (i.e. transfer $100, then transfer $1000, then $1000, etc). This would make the accident “hit a button and lose a B right away” much harder to pull off. Of course, in this case I don’t know that it would help as I believe the attacked party signed approval to change the contract itself.
What does DoD stand for, in this context?
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This would also protect againts dusting attacks.
Illicit addresses sending to thousands of random recipients and making them all marked by automated KYC systems.
Can someone even explain what Bybit is actually about? I searched around when the hack was announced, but I'm very confused. Mostly what I saw said "scam" on it.
This isn't your run-of-the-mill Coinbase style exchange, right?
It's the second largest crypto exchange by volume globally, behind Binance. Specialized in derivatives but they have lots of regular retail products that you might find at Coinbase. Basically like a bigger version of Coinbase from Asia.
Also a major sponsor of Red bull Racing in Formula 1.
I have no idea how crypto exchanges work. Could someone ELI5 some of this? I have questions:
Did the cold storage wallet contain users' ETH? That seems implied by "Can Cover Loss".
If so, why does a crypto exchange hold users' ETH in a wallet that can execute transactions without said user's authorization/password for each transaction. Doesn't even Facebook require entering a password every time to change certain profile settings?
Or maybe more generally, why does there need to be such a large cold-storage wallet to run an exchange?
Also how or why would they have the assets to be able to cover this?
There's some other seemingly conflicting info I found in searches for Bybit:
- Bybit is not legal in Canada. Bybit is restricted in Canada and other jurisdictions, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Singapore.
- Bybit originates from Singapore, a global hub for cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. Singapore has a favorable regulatory environment for cryptocurrencies, which has attracted many exchanges to establish their headquarters there.
- There's also a mix of results where some say Bybit is safe/secure and others saying they aren't (irrespective of this event). This story seems to indicate that they had measures to make it safe, but it didn't save them.
"Please rest assured that all other cold wallets are secure."
Unreal.
He means "...secure. (For now.)"
He just left off the implied part.
A crypto exchange WazirX was hacked for ~$300M, roughly 50% of the users fund gone.
There is no action on the CEO since the hack in July 2024. He sits in Dubai. He just got a nod from Supreme Court of SG to just average out the funds and distribute it among the users.
No action has been initiated against the company/ceo for losing the fund. He is geared up to launch another company/exchange.
What action can be taken? There's no law against getting hacked or being a moron.
There is a law against gross negligence. Holding client money comes with other obligations too.
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Atomic Wallet users lost $100M in June 2023 hack, the company continues to operate as if nothing happened, no word of any restitution to the users.
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What are the chances that a Bybit insider is behind this?
Or former insider.
I spent several years pointing out to my last employer that every former employee could have walked off with secrets that allowed them access to our backends. The were already slowly working on hardening write access but read access was still being worked on a couple months before I left, when I got to write about half of the last mile code for the user facing bits.
This is not a unique experience by any means. I’ve seen this sort of thing enough to pay attention when acquaintances bitch about it too.
Are these business-owned exchanges and managed wallets not fundamentally incompatible with making guarantees of security? Is anyone doing it the "right" way and what does the right way even look like?
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10000%. You would have to be soft in the head to not conclude that's the case.
> have a wallet, work at bybit > understand backdoor > steal money from your account, some from others > bybit pays you back > still have money you stole
And they keep everything in one wallet why?!?!
Surely you'd allocate a new wallet/1m roughly and always keep it spread.
"Control" has a specific meaning under UCC Article 12, which was ratified in 2022 and is slowly being adopted by U.S. states. It links some rights to control/possession of keys, even if a blockchain asset may have been stolen before being sold, https://www.clearygottlieb.com//news-and-insights/publicatio...
> Article 12 – dealing directly with the acquisition and disposition of interests (including security interests) in “controllable electronic records,” which would include Bitcoin, Ether, and a variety of other digital assets ... a good faith purchaser for value who obtains control (a “qualifying purchaser”) takes its interest free of conflicting property claims... Control under Article 12 is designed to be a technology-neutral functional equivalent of “possession.” It generally encompasses circumstances when a party has the “private key”
I think (I assume but could be wrong) in the average CEO X-tweet "control" likely only means 'control' nobody was reading through UCC Article 12 while drafting this message
As in: "The hacker gained access to" "The hacker took charge of" "The hacker assumed authority over"
Those are all equivalent to exclusive control of the private key, which is the meaning within UCC Article 12.
What is the purpose of this comment?
It describes the legal status of stolen cryptocurrency changing after the first sale. This HN story is about stolen cryptocurrency. In particular:
> The wallet has sold around $200 million worth of stETH so far
If some of those sales took place within jurisdiction of a U.S. state that has ratified UCC Article 12, then the buyer of the stolen cryptocurrency is now the new legal owner.
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It is important everyone is thinking real hard about how this is different from traditional theft: there is no way to actually prove the operators didn't just steal everything themselves vs actual real hack theft.
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When even professional companies that have billions of dollars under management can't securely manage their crypto assets, how likely is it that individuals can?
It's a different ball game. The resources that went into executing this kind of hack were probably far higher than most wallets are worth anyway.
Maybe not - a number of high-value past hacks have been very low effort
I have yet to see a thorough explanation of what specifically was hacked here anyhow
In case of a state actor just imagine the weapons that could be bought with this kind of money and the potential lives lost due to this mess
I wouldn't be surprised if Bybit cuts a deal with the hacker to return the funds. There's no way that $1.46 billion of marked ETH can be liquidated and off-ramped to fiat.
That’s well within the daily trading volume.
Well within real daily trading volume is less clear.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/javierpaz/2022/08/26/more-than-...
Exchanges will blacklist the addresses that hold the hacked ETH. They won't be able to deposit, or if they can deposit, the ETH will be frozen by the exchange.
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Their English Wikipedia page is deleted as of 1:42am pst. Any idea what that’s about?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bybit shows the history of deletions and creations of the page.
The current deletion is for reasons that include lack of NCORP (Notability (organizations and companies)). And they back that in turn by saying that the sources are weak.
I understand on one side that they don’t want every company in the world to have a Wikipedia page. Because the point of Wikipedia is not to promote or legitimise every company in the world.
But you’d think that at the point where widely covered news of a hack leading to a loss of a billion dollars and a half, would be reason to have a Wikipedia article about it.
And instead they went and deleted the article today.
There’s probably additional editing of the page itself that you can dig into the history of if you want to see what happened during the past couple of days leading up to the page being deleted again.
For me, I’ll file this under Wikipedia Editors gonna Edit. They have all kinds of edit wars and page deletions going on all the time in the background that the rest of us mostly don’t even notice most of the time. And all over I’m still happy with Wikipedia for all of the information it has collected within.
It could be resurrected if there are multiple news stories making it notable for being hacked. It would have to be rewritten, though, to give it substantially different content.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Speedy_deletion#G4
Here's the discussion from the second time it was deleted:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
They're basically saying "nah, that's spam". So when it was recreated yet again, of course it was speedily terminated with prejudice because it just looks like another spam attempt.
Not sure if there's a rule against covering news stories. Seems like we wouldn't want an article on every news event (I'm pretty sure there is a rule against that), but Crowdstrike got an article.
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Given how many of these exchanges have been hacked (or were fraudulent), how is it that people still use them?
Who says ByBit can cover the loss? The article title says that but the article quotes do not. The CEO only said that their other cold wallets are intact and that withdrawals remain normal.
Bybit claims to be regulated by the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority of Dubai.[1] But the lookup page at VARA says they only have "In-principle approval", not a full license. "Applicants holding an IPA are strictly prohibited from initiating operations, conducting any virtual asset activities, or servicing clients until they have obtained their full VASP licence from VARA."
Uh oh.
[1] https://www.vara.ae/en/licenses-and-register/public-register...
> Who says ByBit can cover the loss?
CEO on X
Right.
If you have a balance in ByBit, get it out NOW.
When has the CEO of a cryptocurrency exchange ever lied before?
What possible motivation would he have to not tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
Harumph!!!
Gentleman, please, rest your sphincters!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2Bp8SqYrnE
They're probably just saying that to avoid a run.
Terrifying to imagine how much funding terrorist states might be getting by hacks like this.
One in particular gets about 1 billion dollars a year. Already hit their quota in February
> "Please rest assured that all other cold wallets are secure. All withdrawals are normal," he added.
There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!
I'd probably bet on this being and staying the case. Bybit needs to look as strong as possible here and they probably have a bunch of willing lenders.
The second they have to pause withdrawals and look weak, it could be game over from the (additional) reputational damage.
Chemical Ali ?
Whelp, you better shorted $SAFE.
Remember the golden rule that when it comes to crypto it is a scam 100% of the time. Congrats to the Bybit CEO on his newfound wealth.
>Bybit CEO Ben Zhou wrote on X that a hacker "took control of the specific ETH cold wallet and transferred all the ETH in the cold wallet to this unidentified address."
Um how tf does a cold wallet get hacked?
Have to wait for a post-mortem, but there was some speculation from Ben earlier in his spaces.
They used a gnosis safe which is a smart contract multi-sig wallet that is pretty much the gold standard for Ethereum.
They believed that all of the signers' pcs were hacked and that the UI for signing was staged with a fake element to make it appear like a normal transfer.
They were signing with hardware wallets, but it's hard to verify what you're signing from a ledger typically.
What they ended up signing instead was an upgrade to the smart contract giving control of the gnosis safe to the hacker who then drained it.
I found it funny that the idea of blockchain, which, the system trusts no single entity but trusts transaction consensus, yet one trusts a single entity who holds your wallet and risk of losing if they get hacked while there's no mediators/regulators to revert the transaction
We are in the middle of the bull market. fyi.
My understand is that the original transaction was a small fraction of the total balance of ETH in the wallet. How then were they able to liquidate the entire ETH wallet?
Kim Jong 1337 hacker strikes again
More like byebit.
Unregulated asset exchanges. Haven't we been there before a loong time ago?
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^Yep
When you decentralize finance like this what becomes okay to do according to system rules is exactly what is possible to do according to system rules. We don't have humans in that loop anymore to enforce moral judgments about what constitutes unlawful theft (except for 1 or 2 rare "hard-forks" of various blockchains to reverse devastating transactions).
I feel bad for people who lose large volumes of cryptocurrency to malicious actors in the same way I feel bad for people who lose large volumes of real money to a casino.
It is 2025 now and we all know that anyone who can somehow get your private-key to whatever blockchain backed assets you have "owns" those assets just as much as you do and they are permitted to take them under the rules of the system so whatever you do do not lose that key.
There is no higher arbiter of justice in this space so use it at your own risk.
Being doomed to spending millions of real dollars litigating to buy a trash dump full of used diapers and toxic waste, just to dig around in it looking for a hard disk drive for the rest of your life, seems to be a particularly satisfying Sisyphean form of justice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_buried_in_Newport_land...
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Yes!
A "cleverly masked exploit that altered the smart contract logic"[1] = congratulations!! the contract gives you $1.46B free money!!
I anticipate that the defi community will celebrate the inexorable operation of their logical contracts.
[1] https://cryptonews.com/news/bybit-crypto-exchange-faces-1-5-...
In this case yes - everything went by the design and law of the underlying code. There was no exploited bug or vulnerability flaw besides human laziness here.
1) Their multi-signature wallet signing employees lazily clicked through in unison to approve a new smart contract without examining the contents to see if it was unusual.
2) Bad security architecture to keep too much in a single wallet that wasn't properly kept cold. There should have been a few fully cold wallets, that only rarely transact with mostly-cold intermediary "airlock" wallets which are also separated from the exchange operations and wallets. The signers also need to be different combinations of people for each of those wallets - preferably some of those signers being additionally liable 3rd party technical experts.
>There was no bug or vulnerability flaw
when code is law, there can't be any bugs or vulnerabilities, only features.
I see this quote repeated here often, but working in the industry I've never heard it said unironically by any of my peers or thought leaders in the space. Best I can tell it is a sort of lazy straw man repeated by skeptics. Does it have an origin?
https://blockchain-society.science/?p=218
https://ethereumclassic.org/blog/2024-04-03-ethereum-classic...
Are those appropriate sources?
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The original idea with crypto was that the "code" was so strong, it removed the need for physical banks, tellers, FDIC, law enforcement, etc. The theory was, we can have everything the banking system has, but cheaper, because the only way to steal money was to break the crypto itself, hence "code is law".
The industry cannot appeal to the protections of law enforcement, civil tort, and other features of the regulated banking system, without simultaneously undermining the "crypto" part. If you're going to summon authorities when hackers hack, you're no better off than if you just acted like any other bank and stored the client's balance in an excel sheet.
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“skibidi is toilet”
what r u talkin ab?
woops
These are not hacks, just like Mtgox, Celsius, FTX etc etc etc were not hacks. These are crypto insiders supporting the stablecoin so they can print and set a floor on prices before/during potential mass sell off events.
The entirety of the cryptocurrency world is so obviously a "Chesterton's Fence" situation.
Every pseudo-intellectual thinks that the fiscal world is "too complicated" and they're going to "simplify" it by making some token, only for people to realize that the monetary world is just complicated, and they have to reinvent everything that already existed in the traditional banking system.
I had to do some work on an ACH system a couple years ago [1], and I read through a large chunk of the ACH standard, which was about 800 pages. It's easy to see and hear that and think "that's way too complicated, what could possibly be so hard about money transfers that necessitates an 700 page specification??", but as I read it and saw how many edge cases it took into account, it was easy to see why it got so huge. It turns out that dealing with money is just a really hard problem at scale.
I fell for the cryptocurrency hype of 2021, and I will fully acknowledge that that came out of a complete lack of understanding of how fiscal systems work. I wish everyone else would just grow up already.
[1] Usually disclaimer: not hard to find my work history, it's not hidden, but I ask that you do not post anything about it (or at least any proper nouns about it) here.
For what it’s worth, I’m a “crypto believer” and I have never considered ease of use to be one of its selling points.
What you are describing are the systems of power which create a stable financial system. That is, one where you can put a nickel into a bank account and expect it to be there in a year or a hundred years.
That indeed requires a complex web of power structures, because its top line goal is to be stable and dependable. And stability within a complex landscape requires an equally complex network of power.
Crypto provides the exact opposite value: it cannot be controlled, no matter how robust your power structure is. It can be insured, at a significant cost, but not controlled.
That means in the face of even totalitarian powers someone could still move crypto across any boundary that is permeable to information, which it turns out is a set that roughly approximates the set of all boundaries.
This is a terrible way to pay for candy bars, because candy bars are not worth insuring.
But what I think the crypto opponents miss is that there is a set of transactions—some criminal, some legal, some immoral, some righteous—which cannot be made in a state controlled financial systems.
And that these transactions are what gives crypto value as a currency.
To me, where I would like the debate to go is not “is crypto a scam?” but “how does society protect people from the violence facilitated by crypto?”
Yes, financial “violence”, which can be insured against, but also real violence: human trafficking, extortion, etc.
We anarchists sometimes like to pretend that without rulers we will be freed to care for each other. But in the shadow of a history of violence, there will be more violence too.
And the “crypto is a scam” argument I fear is a red herring that distracts from this, the real issue.
Power structures can absolutely control crypto. They can make it illegal - it won't eradicate it altogether (see: war on drugs), but it will severely decrease its influence. No one is bragging about investing their retirement savings into cocaine, and Paypal does not offer it to me either.
Or if government is smarter, they can slowly gain control over it. Allow trading traceable currencies via official channels, but with good KYC measures. Do not allow fully anonymous systems. Go after mixers. Prosecute exchanges which do not verify their customers. Once there are plenty of government-sanctioned exchanges in the country, there will be little incentive to create unsanctioned ones, and someone with coins that were marked "North Korean-originated" won't be able to spend them in the country.
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> Crypto provides the exact opposite value: it cannot be controlled, no matter how robust your power structure is. It can be insured, at a significant cost, but not controlled.
This is such a naive claim parroted by crypto enthusiasts. Lots of criminal things can't be 'controlled' (e.g. stopping people murdering, stealing, etc.), but there are consequences if you do them.
Crypto could easily be controlled by laws or punitive taxes. KYC is a step in that direction. But still this claim keeps coming out. All they need to do is control the off-ramps.
It's like the one "but, but, there will only ever be a fixed amount of BTC, so it's valuable!". There will only ever be a fixed amount of my turds, but I don't see them up for auction. It also doesn't explain why BTC is the valuable one but not all the clones (spoiler: it's the brand name).
It's easier to just parrot some grifter's justifications than actually thinking for yourself I guess.
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The crypto community continues to speed run the history of traditional finance. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31777761
It's only a matter of time until we get a railroad track laying network secured by proof of railroad track (PoRT) and recreate the panic of 1873.
I don’t know anyone working in crypto who complains about the physical world being too complex. Imaginary dragons are easily slayed.
If you read the original bitcoin paper, it complains about bank centralization and “issues” with traditional finance for a not-insignificant amount of it, and presents cryptocurrency as a solution.
I will admit I used a bit of shorthand, but the paper is providing a “simple” solution to a “complex” problem.
another "exchange was hacked" story, why I am not surprised.
"Oops, we were hacked, hehe, guess we'll have to shutdown. Oh and our CEO will be moving to another country."
From the article:
> The wallet in question appears to have sent 401,346 ETH ($1.1 billion) as well as several other iterations of staked ether (stETH) to a fresh wallet, which is now liquidating mETH and stETH on decentralized exchanges, etherscan shows. The wallet has sold around $200 million worth of stETH so far.
If you showed me a paragraph like this a decade ago and told me it was from 2025, I would have a difficult time believing you.
Crypto shenanigans were happening in 2015, even as far back as 2010, so I would have to absolutely believed you to hear that it continues happening, as crypto is a fundamentally unstable platform.
I think he means the sheer volume
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Just crazy. Bank heists fully online...
It's a cold wallet which means it should never be connected to the internet, so not entirely online, but yes - these are the wild wild west times of the internet. Imagine how easy it was to go into a bank shoot some people and get out with money, and doing it like, daily? monthly? Today it's not possible.
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It's definitely embarrassing that people losing their shirts in crypto didn't see it coming. It's bad that people think a zero sum game is worth playing against incumbents. The marks aren't the worst part, though. Everyone promoting memecoins and utility-free cryptocurrency in general is either ignorant or just a bad person with a warped idea of success. Personal money accumulation is a sad goal compared to actual wealth creation. The parasites who push crypto on the hopeful proto-bag holders are destroying the prosperity that supports them.
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It was an offline multi-sig wallet. Hackers seem to have musked the transaction when the owners signed it as it looked good to them.
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And only a few weeks ago the lawsuit started payout the 'early lump sum' repayment option for creditors.
"Bybit CEO Ben Zhou wrote on X that a hacker "took control of the specific ETH cold wallet and transferred all the ETH in the cold wallet to this unidentified address."
From the article. Not that I endorse crypto, in fact I despise it. But at least per this statement, it seems to have been handled offline. How a hacker could get access to this is another story to unpack.
edit: I guess this is the story that "unpacks". One more reason to not believe in crypto.
https://x.com/benbybit/status/1892963530422505586
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Society has devolved a bit when not long ago a heist like this would involve sieging Nakatomi Plaza, now it takes just finding a bug in someone's defective Python codes.
It has been this way since the dawn of electronic banking. I once had complete access to all digital wallets for the Seattle metro, which I gained by looking at two cards and noticing the numbers were incrementing. Even with all of the flaws of electronic transactions, it's still better than walking to the bank and hoping a check won't bounce.
You don't even have to break into a wierd high-tech vault to get an unreasonably slow (or fast) billion-dollar progress bar with a snazzy custom UI toolkit these days. Not sure if technology or inflation is most to blame!
yes, this part won't play well in the movie: it takes just as long to transfer a billion as a dollar; the progress bar won't allow any time to build suspense... will they finish in time? cuts between parallel timelines...
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I wonder how many programmers resort to crime after they were laid off and couldn't find a job. Like soldiers after a war.
Relevant comedy sketch? "Secret agent squad, but they're all just the hacking guy."
https://youtu.be/cL7lhbtWwbY?feature=shared
not related to the current western market, but countries like Romania pre EU had a huge surplus of soviet-educated young people and no jobs. This definitely increased their involvement with "informal" economies for some time.
That might make for a good book or movie plot.
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Most likely these programmers are serving in the DPRK Unit 180.
That's pretty much what ex-IDF members do, but they set it up as a company so it becomes legal somehow, I guess...
I think you mean evolved - remote work culture is paying dividends!
You just gotta trust the wrong people.
Don’t forget FTX willingly hired the Ultimate Bet “god mode” guy.
Crypto use case: Finance North Korea's nuclear missile program.
I’m not worried we have entire federal agencies to regulate financial crime and nuclear operations don’t we?
They can't really do anything when it comes to crypto in comparison to actual money. There's a reason why countries like Iran, North Korea, and Russia are resorting to stealing crypto by various means.
had
Also financing russia, fascism and the worst cryptobros
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Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive / snarky / tropey comments here. It leads to generic / repetitive / nasty discussion, and we're hoping to avoid that here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The genius behind crypto is that it's not just the extremely gullible. I know a fair number of really smart people, academics even, that have bought into the cryptocurrency hype.
It has this kind of veil of "high techness" to it that is appealing to smart-but-uninformed people (like me in 2021). I'm embarrassed that I fell for it, but on the bright side it does make me a bit more sympathetic for other people who also fell for it.
> The genius behind crypto is that it's not just the extremely gullible.
I don't know about you, but I barely follow cryptocurrency news, and I've still been hearing about major players getting "hacked" several times a year for over a decade.
Either it's Mt Gox or FTX or The DAO or Bitfinex or QuadrigaCX or Terra/Luna or rug-pull meme coins or dollar-backed coins that actually aren't or any of a dozen other things.
Anyone who isn't being extremely careful to avoid scams, given the constant drumbeat of reports about how you have to be extremely careful to avoid scams when dealing with cryptocurrency, is pretty gullible.
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Being smart or academic does absolutely not mean these people aren't gullible.
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To be honest, a distributed logic execution engine is an interesting tech, it just isn't something to build any high value economy on top of.
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Crypto: where Kernighan’s Law meets con artistry.
What is the gullibility here?
Thinking you can store your crypto with some 3rd party that _definitely_ won't get hacked (or """hacked"""), also thinking your crypto won't become worthless from a singular unusual event. Actually the most gullible are the people who think of cryptocurrency as an "investment" XD
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https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/
As Frank Drebin would say, “Nothing to see here.”
https://youtube.com/watch?v=aKnX5wci404
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So salty! And yet...How's ETH Classic doing? It was the right move at the time to fork. And pretty obviously would be the wrong move today.
For context, guluarte is referring to a moderately contentious hardfork done by the Ethereum developers and mining community to reverse TheDAO Hack in 2016 or so. The stakes were much larger then -- Ethereum was newer, not yet battle tested, and TheDAO had something like 10% of all ETH in it.
A fork was formed -- "ETH Classic" -- ticker ETC -- which did not reverse the DAO hack, and you can see from valuations that the public preferred the reversal.
I mean, the public comprised of the developers of Ethereum who had significant financial incentive to pretend the hack did not happen and to forever publicize their chain of history.
Code is law, up until it costs me.
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let’s not forget that Satoshi rolled back Bitcoin in 2010, whereas Ethereum was a surgical state change within a smart contract
What are you talking about in 2010?
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Old man yells at cloud vibes every time a crypto post comes on HN.
No interesting discussions ever. Just axes being sharpened and people who dislike it taking the opportunity to gloat. I would characterize the pro crypto people but I don’t see any. Which is said because over the last 5 years I have found crypto, bitcoin, and stable coins to be extremely useful when helping family members in emerging markets.
But hey it’s all trash, the west doesn’t need it so let’s all dance on its grave.. i guess we will keep dancing for another 15 years.
There's no interesting discussion to be had. That's the simple reason you always miss.