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A hacker has allegedly just stolen around $7.4 million dollars worth of ether, the cryptocurrency that underpins the app platform ethereum, by tricking victims into sending money to the wrong address during an Initial Coin Offering, or ICO. This is according to a company called Coindash that says its investors were sending their funds to a hacker.
On Monday, Coindash, which offers a trading platform for ether, was slated to launch its Initial Coin Offering. These are essentially crowdfunding drives that allow investors to own a stake in the app by buying digital assets called tokens. Initial Coin Offerings are an incredibly popular method of funding an app on ethereum, and some ICOs have raked in millions of dollars within minutes of going live. Even the silliest apps have been able to raise thousands of dollars in token investments during recent ICOs.
Coindash's ICO, like many others, launched simply by posting a string of text representing an ethereum address for investors to send money to on the app's website. However, mere minutes into what was supposed to be another successful ICO, Coindash warned that its website had been hacked and asked people not to send ethereum to the posted address.
It's still unclear exactly what happened, but it seems like the hack was incredibly simple: The hacker allegedly took control of the Coindash official website and changed the text on the site, publishing their own ether wallet address instead of Coindash's. When people went to "invest" in Coindash, they actually sent their ether to the hacker, not the company.
Even though Coindash noticed the hack and warned investors quickly—just three minutes after the ICO launch—the damage was done.
Source: MotherBoard
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @01:39AM
spread the wealth mofo
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @01:47AM
If an important person or important corporation lost any money, the good folks at Ethereum will just rewind this transaction. No, not you. You are not important.
(Score: 1) by nnet on Wednesday July 19 2017, @02:30AM (4 children)
so how is the perp actually going to get hard cash from this?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @03:19AM
No idea. But however it was done, my guess is that speed was important.
Speculation -- convert to other digital currencies several times, split into smaller amounts, then to something popular like bitcoin where it can be changed into dollars or other regular currency?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @03:26AM (1 child)
Isn't there "whirlpool" services for this? Constant stream of bitcoins/whatever transactions of various values go in and a constant stream of transactions of various values (less a small fee, of course) go out. No way to tie inputs to outputs, so they say.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @03:52AM
google tells me to look here, https://www.whirlpool.com/services/about-us.html [whirlpool.com]
Perfect match for anyone new to money laundering... (ducking)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @04:16AM
http://www.warplife.com/tips/finance/asset/protection/money-laundering/howto/internet/ [warplife.com]
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Wednesday July 19 2017, @05:32AM (1 child)
Is there any way to undo such a thing when you're using a block-chain? My (limited) understanding is that there wouldn't be, but I'm happy to be corrected.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tonyPick on Wednesday July 19 2017, @10:11AM
Theoretically Yes - but only if enough people agree. And Ethereum have rolled back before, when events[1] have happened that the majority didn't approve of, resulting in a fork of the blockchain:
http://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-classic-explained-blockchain/ [coindesk.com]
https://qz.com/730004/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-ethereum-hard-fork/ [qz.com]
So for this, practically, probably not.
[1] I'm deliberately avoiding putting the word "hack" in there, since that's arguable....
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @11:10AM
Making a app to do with digital currency transactions ... Fuck up their digital currency transactions.
so, why should anyone trust them?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @11:39AM
Stupid bean counters, take notice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @06:17PM
It would utterly destroy trust in the system if valid, intentional, legitimate transactions can be reverted because someone made a mistake and regrets sending money to a certain address.
The person responsible should go to prison, and have their key sized and used to return the coins, but it must not be imposed from outside the system but conducted within the system.
When someone steals cash we would never even consider registering those bill's serial numbers as invalid and printing replacements to reimburse the victims, because that would utterly destroy trust in the cash.
Of course people will try to do so nonetheless, this will be a good test of the security of the system.