On 20th of July, a hacker stole $31M worth of Ethereum and while this is not recent news, it remains one of the biggest thefts in crypto history.
But the story seems to be quite impressive since the hacker stole 31 million of dollars in Ethereum by exploiting a vulnerability in a smart contract who’s code was written by an elite group of developers, in the Ethereum community, who apparently made a mistake along the way.
Around 12:00 PST, an unknown attacker exploited a critical flaw in the Parity multi-signature wallet on the Ethereum network, draining three massive wallets of over $31,000,000 worth of Ether in a matter of minutes. Given a couple more hours, the hacker could’ve made off with over $180,000,000 from vulnerable wallets.
The hacker could have stolen up to 180 millions of dollars if there weren’t the good hackers .who found out about this and managed to find the same vulnerability. Still, the infamous hacker grabbed an impressive amount but since the alert was triggered, the white hackers managed to stop this from escalating.
How did they do it? Well, this is the interesting part. The white hat hackers stole the rest of the remaining assets at risk before the bad hacker had the chance. By doing this, the white hat hackers ensured that the funds of banks and other investors, won’t get lost.
Of course, eventually the remaining 180 million were returned to the owners and even if more than 30 million disappeared, only the intervention of true white hat hackers made this outcome less aggravated. The group explained their actions in a post on reddit.
If you want to know more about this story, like specific technical data or what impact had this theft on Ethereum, follow this link on medium.