Web3 is Going Just Great

It's not clear yet how the attack was perpetrated, although crypto researcher Spreek reposted a comment by an admin in Fantom's Telegram channel, where they blamed the theft on a zero-day exploit in Google Chrome.

The post by crypto media outlet CoinTelegraph was based on a faked screenshot of what appeared to be the Bloomberg Terminal. The post quickly propagated through the crypto world before people began to question its veracity. CoinTelegraph later issued an apology, blaming the incident on a failure by employees to follow the normal editorial approval process.

This adds to the list of incidents that illustrate the extent to which false reporting by traditional or crypto media, or by influential personalities, can move crypto markets. Past incidents have included a crypto Twitter personality tweeting the false rumor that Interpol had issued a red notice for Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, and two instances of token price spikes based on false press releases claiming major corporations would accept the tokens as payment.

Attackers previously stored the malicious code on typical webhosting services, but those services began to take it down. Now, some have started using Binance's blockchain to store these payloads, taking advantage of the immutable nature of blockchains to prevent anyone from taking it down.

Platypus was quickly able to recover $575,000 from this latest hacker, thanks to a flaw in their attack. Later, they recovered all but $167,400 of the stolen funds after coming to an agreement with the attacker that they would not pursue legal action.