Decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms continue to be targeted by hackers and thieves. This time it was Wintermute’s turn, a so-called cryptocurrency market maker from the United Kingdom.
Evgeny Gaevoy, the Dutch CEO and founder of Wintermute, confirmed the attack on Twitter this morning. He reports that as much as $160 million worth of crypto has been stolen:
We’ve been hacked for about $160M in our defi operations. Cefi and OTC operations are not affected
— wishful cynic (@EvgenyGaevoy) September 20, 2022
Gaevoy also reports that only the company’s DeFi platform has been hacked. He says the company still has enough assets in-house to reimburse customers’ stolen funds. He only warns that Wintermute’s services will be disrupted for the next few days.
No major crypto sell-off expected
Furthermore, the CEO says that he does not expect an impact on the market due to the theft. That’s because as many as 90 different assets have been stolen. More than $1 million worth of value was stolen from just two tokens and no more than $2.5 million from any token. So it is not expected that there will be a large market dump or sell off tracking a particular crypto currency.
Finally, Gaevoy reports that he sees this incident as a “white hatattack, i.e. a hacker with so-called good intentions. These “ethical” hackers are increasingly popular and often seek out vulnerabilities in the underlying code to earn a reward. However, you may question whether taking someone else’s money hostage is actually so ethical.
Meanwhile, people are leaving messages on the transactions en masse, because they are public addresses. It is noticeable that several people are begging for a part of the stolen crypto. It’s not a pretty sight.
People spamming the wintermute exploiter
Always fun going through these messages pic.twitter.com/a8ZSoQKFT1— Paul (@Frapees) September 20, 2022
We’ve already seen a lot of these kinds of DeFi hacks this year. Last month, $570,000 was stolen from Curve, but Binance recovered 83% of the stolen crypto. Shortly before that, even $200 million was cross chain bridge Nomad stolen. According to Chainalysis, hackers have already stolen at least $2 billion this year with these types of “bridge hacks.”