FTX suffers $400 million hack, remaining funds moved to cold storage

About $400 million in cryptocurrency was taken from the beleaguered FTX exchange in the past few hours. After declaring bankruptcy just hours before, the exchange stated that it had been hacked.

The FTX Community Chat admin sent a message to the official Telegram group of the exchange that the bankrupt platform was hacked and all apps were malware.

The administrator advised users to delete the app and not visit the website or open their mobile applications as they could end up with Trojans.

Over $380 million in user funds are gone

The actual amount withdrawn from the exchange has yet to be determined, as sources claim it is between $380 million and $600 million.

According to Etherscan, the drain address has processed more than 140 transactions and received funds from several wallets linked to FTX. In just two hours, the address received 83,878.63 ETH (over $105.3 million).

In addition to receiving funds, the wallet also exchanged USDT for DAI. It also moved funds across other networks such as Binance Smart Chain and Solana.

Crypto intelligence firm Arkham Intelligence revealed that the hacker gradually dumped all assets into the CowSwap DEX aggregator.

As of press time, Arkham also stated that the hacker had finished dumping LINK, MATIC, AAVE and SHIB. The hacker still has PAXG and SNX, which may be sold at a later date.

Meanwhile, USDT issuer has Tether blacklisted 27.5 million USDT on Solana and 3.9 million USDT on Avalanche.

Exchange Hack an Inside Job?

With so much unknown, many believe that if this is a hack, it must be an insider job. Adam Cochran noted that the hacker had access to “the private key, the root level of the website, and the publisher key access to the apps.”

Another user highlighted that the breach included an Apple publisher key breach. This allowed the “hacker” to sideload malware into the FTX app. Many users are reporting that their FTX balance is now showing zero.

Many in the crypto community point to the fact that FTX has never been hacked since it began its operations. Therefore, the idea of ​​the stock exchange being hacked immediately after filing for bankruptcy is shady.

FTX moves funds to cold storage

However, official sources from the planned firm have not yet confirmed the development.

FTX.US General Counsel Ryne Miller acknowledged that the exchange was investigating some “wallet movement abnormalities related to the consolidation of FTX balances across exchanges.”

Miller further tweeted that the exchange moved its funds into cold storage after the wave of “unauthorized transactions”. He said:

“Following the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings – FTX US and FTX [dot] com initiated precautionary measures to move all digital assets to cold storage. The process was sped up tonight – to reduce damage from observing unauthorized transactions.”

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