Hackers steal $1.5bn from crypto exchange in ‘biggest digital heist ever’
Bybit platform appeals to ‘brightest minds’ in cybersecurity for help after attacker transfers Ethereum currency
These incidents sincerely undermine some of the “big advantages” of blockchain. I worked for an NFT company for awhile, and we talked about how people stealing like this would just have the funds reversed because the blockchain can fork to solve it. But that shit rarely happens, or if it does, it’s probably all international money laundering. I have 0 faith in the community now, and it was a whole cult back in 2021.
I worked for an NFT company for awhile, and we talked about how people stealing like this would just have the funds reversed because the blockchain can fork to solve it
This is a pretty naive perspective when it goes directly against the whole ethos of the network. You can't have credible neutrality and also have hardfork bailouts every time a centralized exchange with poor security practices gets hacked or "hacked", these are mutually incompatible things. For a financial infrastructure that does reversals and central authority judgment calls, there is always fiat and banks.
I agree that there’s some line, but if we’re really talking about $1.5bn & it really is a theft, it seems reasonable to me. /shrug
It’s probably money laundering anyway, but I dunno. If the blockchain is protected through a decentralized ledger, couldn’t they vote via governance?
Keep in mind, I read the headline & not the article. I got no clue what chain or crypto involves the story. The web3 world gave me a salary boost, and that was enough for me. It was stressful working in a grey area at times.
and nothing of value was lost
Don't worry, this is a feature of the blockchain!
Lack of oversight is something all the users want, so obviously, everyone is fine with this.
Your comment is quite misleading. Blockchain is all about verification and transparency and that is the reason why people knew about the hack that quickly. Authorities, private companies and individuals are following the funds block after block. The hack concern an exchange, a central entity with lots of ether tokens, not a blockchain.
From my understanding and this is still under investigation, the main issue is that the compromised exchange didn't suffer from any breach. Their multi-sig setup signed a transaction liked if the company was agreeing. Could have been all the required key stolen ? Maybe. All the employee having keys getting corrupted ? Unlikely. From what I've read about the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), in multi-sig (Safe or Gnosis safe as exemples) setups, users have no way to verify what they are signing on their harware wallets (signing devices).The whole Ethereum ecosystem have been used to blindly signed for years and today they might realize that's a bad design choice. Lazarus could have hacked the centralized coordinator entity such as app.safe.global, but as I said this is still under investigation and I'm not a professionnal just a free software enthousiast.
This is an Ethereum, actually more of a EVM Turing Complete, design issue if I understood it correctly. You don't have this problem that much the on Bitcoin multi-sig UTXOs ecosystem were it's simpler and many great hardware wallet let you verify on their screen what you are signing (hww without a trusted screen are not designed to be signing devices) but none, 0% let you verify what you sign with an Ethereum smarcontract. It is possible you can do that on Ledger with 1Inch from what I've understand, but no one cared until today and so no one wanted to fund the creation of ledger app for this.
A feature of blockchains, actually it's not blockchain in itself but rather the competitive PoW consensus mechanism (Ethereum forked to PoS) enforced by game theory is immuability and finality of the transactions. With Bitcoin you cannot rollback. Ethereum did a rollback in the early days creating a fork named Ethereum Classic which is the ledger that did not rollback. I don't think Ethereum will rollback again, especially for such a small amount of ether and I think if they wanted and had the opportunity, it would have been already done. People screaming they will are delusional but maybe I'm wrong :)
Finality might seem a scary feature at first, in reality it enable you to create reversible transactions through escrow multi-sig setup. Actually you don't even need to, the mempool is not immuable on Bitcoin you can do a RBF. You don't create trust by simply having a shiny blockchain, people thinking it removes trust don't understand money nor distributed ledger. Whatever, with this hard finality system you can create softness emulating what the banking system usually offers. So you get the soft system built on top of a hard system, unlike internationnal banking on which you can't put a hard system on top of.
Edits : Add nuance, clarifications, improved readability, etc...
Sorry that your Neopoints were stolen.
Ethereum and EVM multi-sig is basically blind-signing on every hardware wallet. EVM is simply a bad design.