In the modern digital world, security hacks and theft attempts are a bitter reality. As much as modern projects and organizations are prioritizing their security features, hackers and stealers are also becoming more advanced in their attempts. Thus, the blockchain world is also not immune to this phenomenon. Towards the end of March, the Ronin Network had identified a massive hacking attempt on its server. In the attack, a large number of funds were stolen in ETH and USDC from Axie Infinity.
The hacking attempt was identified after 6 days. In the meantime, the hackers pulled out 173,600 ETH and 25.50 million USDC in two transactions. The total stolen value mounts up to $610 million. The hackers had exploited technical negligence from the network to make these massive transactions. These stolen assets could be seen on the address of the hacker. However, now the funds are beginning to move.
Stolen Funds of the largest crypto exploit on Axie Infinity being to move
The blockchain address of the hacker was flagged for the hack it made on the Ronin Bridge, Axie Infinity on March 23. However, there have been several transactions from the suspected wallet address in the past few hours. At first, a total of 1,000 ETH were moved to another address. These ETH tokens were worth approximately $3.50 million.
Moreover, after this transaction, several other transactions of 100 ETH were recorded from the address. All of these transactions went to the Tornado Cash Ethereum mixing service. These transactions were observed and tweeted by a Chinese cryptocurrency analyst.
The address of the hacker who stole $610 million in the Ronin_Network case began to move, transferring 1000 ETH to another address and then 200 ETH to TornadoCash. https://t.co/7RYHCmwght
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) April 4, 2022
Users and consumers have been extremely critical since the news of moving stolen funds broke. They have called for stricter regulations to safeguard the assets of institutional investors. Moreover, they have criticized Tornado Cash, as they believe it is used to wash money and aids money laundering.
However, all of this criticism was expected as this was probably the biggest crypto theft in history. Tornado Cash has become a go-to platform for crypto hackers, as it provides anonymous transactions for ETH and ERC20 tokens. It breaks the on-chain link between the source and destination address, making it easy to move stolen funds.
Sky Mavis is the company behind the Axie Infinity ecosystem, and it has expressed plans to reimburse the users whose funds for stolen in the hacking attempt. Despite the efforts for damage control, Axie Infinity has experienced a major setback because of this incident.
