Mysterious Hack Drains $10 Million from Crypto Whales and Early Crypto Investors – What’s Going On?

Ethereum Hack MetaMask

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Fredrik Vold

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Fredrik Vold

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October 23, 2023

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A mysterious hack has drained more than $10 million worth of ETH and other tokens from a large number of crypto whales.

The theft was first reported by a developer for the popular browser-based wallet MetaMask known as Tay, who wrote on Twitter on Tuesday that “Its rekt my friends & OGs who are reasonably secure.”

“No one knows how,” Tay added.

The MetaMask developer further explained that the hack involves more than 5,000 ETH, as well as an unknown number of other tokens and NFTs on several different blockchains compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

The 5,000 ETH tokens alone are worth close to $10 million by today’s exchange rate.

As indicated by Tay in the original tweet, information on how the hack was carried out remains scarce at this point, but all of the victims appear to have in common that their wallets were created between 2014 and 2022.

“This is NOT a low-brow phishing site or a random scammer. It has NOT rekt a single noob. It ONLY rekts OGs,” Tay wrote, using an acronym for the slang term ‘original gangster’ in crypto.

If you are reading this, you're the type to be drained by this.

This is NOT a low-brow phishing site or a random scammer. It has NOT rekt a single noob. It ONLY rekts OGs.

If you have all your stuff under a single Secret Recovery Phrase / Private Key, please be safe migrate. 🙏 pic.twitter.com/o50pcBaUWT

— Tay 💖 (@tayvano_) April 18, 2023

The MetaMask developer explained about the hack that it has so far targeted only EVM-compatible chains, although it is not exclusive to MetaMask.

“Users of *all* wallets, even those created on a hardware wallet or generated for the Ethereum presale, have been impacted by this,” Tay wrote, while noting that hackers have always exchanged the stolen funds to bitcoin which are then sent through a coin mixer to cover any traces.

Finally, Tay urged users to spread their assets across different wallets in order to reduce the risk of losing all of their assets.

“PLEASE DON’T KEEP ALL YOUR ASSETS IN A SINGLE KEY OR SECRET PHRASE FOR YEARS,” the developer wrote.