Kronos trading firm suffers key breach
Network of fake Twitter accounts impersonating crypto security firms phish panicked victims
According to researcher zachxbt, who himself was one of the impersonated, the scammers have stolen more than $300,000 in various assets using this technique.
This is not the first time such a technique has been used — a scammer attempted a similar, though less successful, scheme in April 2022. Scams like this take advantage of the poor UX in the crypto world for tracking and revoking wallet permissions that have been granted, requiring people to use third-party websites created for this purpose. Some of them are legitimate, but there are many malicious copies of these revocation sites that prey upon users who may be acting quickly in fear that their assets are at risk.
Wallet linked to Binance deployer loses $27 million in apparent hack
Crypto researcher zachxbt observed that the wallet targeted for the theft had in 2019 received a transfer from the Binance deployer, suggesting that the compromised wallet may have some ties to Binance itself.
CoinSpot exchange exploited
Balancer frontend compromised
This is the second theft from Balancer in a month, after it warned of a critical vulnerability on August 22, and that vulnerability was exploited for around $2 million several days later.
Magnate Finance rug pulls for over $5.2 million
Sure enough, within an hour of zachxbt's tweet, the project drained $5.2 million from the protocol and deleted its website and Telegram group.
According to zachxbt, the project also shared on-chain links to the March 2023 Kokomo Finance rug pull, which saw its perpetrators profit around $4.5 million.
Scammers target victims via web3 job search boards
"Jobless and a bit poorer, thanks guys!" he wrote. "You're passionate about its technology, you wanna be part of it. You DCA. You hodl. You do everything you can to do things right... you're passionate, love the space, the tech. The people. Your willingness to get a job in Web3 is enormous! I stand for on-chain values, and I wanna be a part of the wave!" he wrote in frustration, trying to explain how he'd gotten scammed. "The apparent legitimacy of these [web3 job listing] sites made me remove the 'watch out filter', and boom."
CoinsPaid hacked for $37.3 million
After prominent Bitcoiner Jameson Lopp tweeted that the issue "look[s] more like a hack", CoinsPaid replied "Our team is aware of the issue... Please wait for the official announcement on this topic." Crypto researcher zachxbt responded, "The issue is you got hacked by North Korea that's what lol", referencing the increasing suspicion that the Lazarus group may be behind the disruption. Sure enough, CoinsPaid later confirmed that they had been hacked for $37.3 million, and announced that they suspected the Lazarus Group was behind it.
Some have been speculating that there are connections between this incident and the $60 million hack of the Alphapo crypto payments processor on July 22. Alphapo also provided services to various online casinos. Indeed, there seem to be connections between Alphapo and CoinsPaid, and they may in fact be operated by the same people.
Scammer "Soup" makes more than $1 million through Discord hacks
Soup was exposed by crypto sleuth zachxbt, who also described how the scammer had spent some of his ill-gotten funds on exclusive Roblox items that sell for "high 5 figs".
Machi Big Brother sues zachxbt
Huang is also annoyed at zachxbt's observations about the multiple hacks of C.R.E.A.M. Finance, which zachxbt wrote had been exploited three times "due to negligence". "Putting aside that Cream Finance was exploited two, not three times", Huang hilariously writes in the lawsuit, taking issue with the fact that zachxbt supposedly intentionally omitted that some funds were returned and that Huang claims to have been no longer involved with the project by that point. It's not made clear in the lawsuit which of the three hacks recorded on Web3 is Going Just Great — to the tune of $37.5 million (February 2021), $25–30 million (August 2021), and $130 million (October 27, 2021) — supposedly didn't happen.