15h ago

Crypto exchange Bybit says a hacker took control of one of its cold Ethereum wallets, resulting in what analysts estimate was the loss of ~$1.5B worth of tokens

www.bloomberg.com Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

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1d ago

Bybit Hit by Crypto’s Worst Hack With Almost $1.5 Billion Stolen

www.bloomberg.com /news/articles/2025-02-21/bybit-says-exchange-wallet-hacked-1-5-billion-estimated-loss

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29 comments

ELI5 why we cannot "rollback" Ethereum
https://xcancel.com/TimBeiko/status/1893412457567383559#m

The money is not gone, is just that someone else has it.

More like bye-bit, am I right??
- Angry upvote you horrible genius.
- They'll just roll back the blockchain. Ethereum is a centrally controlled cryptocurrency, though its fans claim otherwise. It's been rolled back before.
  
  This is either a person who hasn't followed ETH since 2016 or is intentionally spreading misinformation.
  It HAS been rolled back once, when the blockchain was in its infancy. But to say that it is still "centrally controlled" suggests having no idea what has happened in the 9 years since.

I'm so glad I have no crypto of any kind. It's the wild west with no savings insurance, so once it's gone, it's gone.
- Depends which exchange you're using.

How does one get ones hands on a cold wallet?
- My speculations:
  "insecure from the start" - as in , the wallet was never that "cold"
  with that amount of money, it's easy to imagine an "insider threat"
  the hackers could have gotten lucky and struck right when the company was doing legitimate operations on the wallet
  but probably it's a towering mountain of incompetence, composed of the elements above and more
  
  Room temperature wallet
- Do I understand this correctly, then, that this was some sort of MITM attack where valid requests to the multisig parties were replaced by malicious code while still appearing to be valid to the signers? That must be an inside job.
  And this is the first time I have heard the word "musked" in this context.....
- It's a common misconception that a "cold wallet" is offline. It's still on the blockchain like any other wallet, it's just the keys that aren't on any network-connected computer.
  It appears that in this case hackers managed to trick Bybit employees into entering the keys into a fake UI that gave the hackers access to them.
  
  That’s room temperature wallet. It was used while claiming asset unused.
  It is not cold storage anymore.
  
  Tricked or “tricked”.
- What I don't quite understand is how there is 1.5 billion in a single wallet. Or how are these things structured?
  This article puts their total assets under management at $15.7b, which are held in different cryptocurrencies with ethereum at just above $5b.
  So I am wondering how they have more than 1/6 of their Ethereum in a single wallet or were these multiple that were connected and got compromised through the same vulnerability? How expensive is it to have more individual wallets? Would it not be feasible to have it split in something like $100m chunks? Or any other more moderate size.
- I recommend gloves.
- Well, either it wasn't as offline as they all thought, or someone pulled off an epic inside job.
- With steely determination