Researchers have named the possible cause of abnormal transactions in Ethereum

06/13/2020

Roman Petrov

Two anomalous Ethereum transactions,as a result of which the sender paid $ 5.2 million in fees associated with extortion. This is the opinion of the analysts at PeckShield.

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On June 10, an unknown person transferred 0.55 ETH, paying 10,668 ETH (about $ 2.6 million) as a commission.

The next day, 350 ETH was sent from the same address with a similar abnormally high commission.

PeckShield specialists believe that this is due to the extortion of a hacker who gained partial access to the exchange's hot wallet.

In their opinion, the sequence of actions looked like this:

• as a result of a phishing attack, the hacker gained access to the address;
• multisignature technology prevented the attacker from sending funds to their wallets;
• it found that it could transfer cryptocurrency to addresses from the exchange's whitelist and control the price of gas by simply "burning" the platform's funds;
• the hacker carried out two transactions with abnormal fees and demanded a ransom from the exchange, threatening to spend all available assets.

According to PeckShield, 21,000 remain in the walletETH (about $ 5 million). Analysts noted that the hacker continues to control the wallet's server permissions and the exchange is unable to prevent possible further losses. PeckShield did not name the affected marketplace.

This week's attention was drawn toanother Ethereum transaction with extremely high fees - the address associated with the MiningPoolHub pool paid 2310 ETH ($ 538 thousand) for the transfer of 3221 ETH ($ 751 thousand).

Tom Kaisar, COO of the Forecast Foundation, the organization behind the Augur project, believes that this was the result of a direct hack of the pool's wallet.

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