The attack appears to have been carried out by hackers connected to North Korea, according to British blockchain analytics company Elliptic. More than 45% of WazirX’s $500 million in holdings, as disclosed by the exchange in a June report, are comprised of the pilfered cash.
The attack that resulted in the theft of almost $100 million in Shiba Inu, $52 million in Ethereum, $11 million in Matic’s MATIC, and $6 million in Pepe appears to have been executed by North Korean hackers.
We are aware that there was a security vulnerability in one of our multisig wallets. “Our group is presently looking into the occurrence,” WazirX wrote in a post on X. “To ensure the safety of your assets, Indian rupee and crypto withdrawals will be temporarily paused,” the message read.
The theft comprised almost $100 million in Shiba Inu tokens, $52 million in Ethereum, $11 million in Matic’s MATIC, and $6 million in Pepe, according to blockchain data that Lookonchain monitors.
Transactional data showed that the stolen position was sold by the exploiter using the onchain exchange Uniswap. Additionally, the exploiter possessed FLOKI tokens valued at almost $4.2 million. According to CoinGecko data, WazirX transacted at least $2.2 million in volumes in the last day, with Tether stable currencies and XRP leading the way.
WazirX released a follow-up article a few hours after the initial confirmation, naming Liminal, a cryptocurrency custody company, as the multisig wallet’s supplier. The post was then taken down by the exchange, which claimed that wallets made “outside of the Liminal ecosystem had been compromised.”
A specific type of cryptocurrency wallet called a multisig wallet requires two or more private keys in order to authenticate and confirm transactions prior to processing them. Regarding the WazirX hack and its effects on the nation’s cryptocurrency economy, the Indian Finance Ministry had refrained from commenting.
