FTX was hacked and now the apps are viruses
FTX was hacked last night and over $600 million left customer accounts. It is unclear how much was stolen.
FTX was hacked last night and over $600 million left customer accounts. Cryptoanalysts observed large amounts of ETH, SOL, USDT and other tokens moving from FTX to DEXs, but it is unclear how much was stolen.
According to FTX.US general counsel Ryne Miller, FTX and FTX.US were already planning to move customer funds into cold storage as part of FTX’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy process. Miller says this “The process was accelerated […] to reduce harm from observing unauthorized transactions.”
FTX was hacked, the money is gone, and everything is a virus now
FTX’s lawyer calls them “unauthorized transactions”, but FTX’s support telegram calls it a hack. According to FTX customer support, the ftx.com website can infect visitors with Trojan viruses, and the FTX mobile apps are also considered dangerous. FTX users are advised to delete the FTX apps and stay away from FTX’s websites.
Despite the warnings, some FTX users log into their accounts and find that they have been emptied. During the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire, there was a bank run on FTX and FTX.US. Users withdrew over $6B in just three days. The funds stolen in this hack are what remained after FTX froze withdrawals.
Was the FTX hack an inside job?
Many online observers believe that the FTX hack was an inside job, due to previously insolvent CEXs experiencing inside job hacks on the way down. Supporting the inside job theory is crypto investor Umbrella’s observations that the FTX hackers were not very good at getting away with the money. At first, they used DEX aggregators like 1Inch, which are not popular with hackers looking to dump large amounts of stolen crypto quickly.
According to Umbrella, the hacker did not use bots to minimize slippage when selling their stolen UNI, SHIB and LINK. They have just sold the entire amount. The hacker was also not good at dumping stablecoins: Tether blacklisted $47 million USDT on Solana and Tron before the hacker could sell it, and on Binance Smart Chain the hacker dumped $23 million USDT tokens, but was driven by trading bots and only took 15 million dollars in sales.
Let’s just say that blockchain “specialists” are always prepared for hacks and dumps on the Binance Smart Chain, so you’ll want to use bots when dumping $23M in stolen Tether.
Regardless of who is behind the FTX hack, one thing is clear: many of the remaining users are seeing zero balances on their accounts, and according to FTX, it’s not even safe to log in to check your account balance.
