A hacker hacked a hack via a vulnerability at the same vanity address linked to an attack on trading firm Wintermute last week. cryptocurrency worth $950,000 from your wallet Ethereum rang.
Hacker Sent Stolen Ethereum Altcoins to Tornado Cash
The hacker stole 732 ETH on September 25 and sent it directly to the sanctioned cryptocurrency mixing service Tornado Cash, PeckShield reports, citing on-chain data.
#PeckShieldAlert Seems like $950k worth of crypto has been stolen by 0x9731F from Ethereum “vanity address” generated with a tool called Profanity. The exploiter already transferred ~732 $ETH into Mixer pic.twitter.com/QOZfnE49H4
— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) September 26, 2022
This attack was made possible due to a recent vanity address vulnerability that surfaced on GitHub in January but was made public on September 15 by DEX aggregator 1inch.
A vanity address is a cryptocurrency address that is designed in a specific way, often with a pattern or word in the address, similar to a custom license plate on a car.
Many vanity addresses were created through a tool called Profanity. However, 1inch stressed that the method of generating such addresses makes it easier for them to be breached through a hacker attack.
Although these addresses require extremely high processing power to be hacked, hackers cover these costs with the crypto money in the wallets they hacked.
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There had been a number of minor attacks so far. Earlier this month, $3.3 million was drained from multiple Ethereum addresses using Profanity.
On September 20, cryptocurrency market creation firm Wintermute announced that it had lost $160 million in the hack, and later admitted it was due to this exact issue.
With the increasing popularity of crypto assets in 2021, there was an increase in hacking events.
*Not investment advice.