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The Almighty Buck Crime Japan

$97 Million Stolen From Japanese Crypto Exchange (fortune.com) 44

Posted by EditorDavid from the lots-of-yen dept.
"Hackers have drained Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Liquid of $97 million worth of Ethereum and other digital coins," reports Forbes: The company, in a tweet posted late Thursday, announced the compromise and said it is moving assets that were not affected into more secure "cold wallet" storage. The company has also suspended deposits and withdrawals... Liquid did not put a dollar figure on the amount, but blockchain analytics company Elliptic said its analysis estimates the losses at about $97 million...

Of that, $45 million were in Ethereum tokens, which are being converted into Ether, preventing the hacker from having those assets frozen. Other cryptos taken in the heist include Bitcoin, XRP, and stablecoins.
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$97 Million Stolen From Japanese Crypto Exchange More

$97 Million Stolen From Japanese Crypto Exchange

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  • That attacker must have been an amateur. For sure the laughable "security" these exchanges employ did not stop them.

    • The attacker is probably working on the inside. The industry is unregulated. May as well visit Los Vegas and have some fun gambling lol. Many winners and losers in the cryptocurrency space. I have been around the blockchain space since inception and even with my advanced education and multiple years of industry experience I cannot profess to understand the nuances of the IP involved. There are just so many vectors to attack or manipulate technically and that should give pause to any serious investor.
  • Did not the whole idea pf crypto rest on it being unstoppable? If you can reverse or stop it even if its stolen it sort of defeats the purpouse does it not? Remember even google and apple started out as idealists.

    • No, the purpose was to avoid spending it twice (Score:4, Informative)

      by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Sunday August 22, 2021 @09:28AM (#61717363) Journal

      > Did not the whole idea pf crypto rest on it being unstoppable? If you can reverse or stop it even if its stolen it sort of defeats the purpouse does it not?

      No.

      The purpose was to avoid "the double spend problem".
      Transactions are recorded in the public ledger so that if you have one Bitcoin, you can't send that coin to Bob, then later send it to Sally, and also to Fred, buying things from three different people using the same *coin. The blockchain tracks how much you have, so you can't spend more than that.

      Cryptocurrency can be seized / stopped if it's placed in an Exchange / online wallet. When you "spend" crypto (or money) that you have in an account with a service provider such as an exchange, what you're actually doing is directing the *exchange* to send the money. The exchange can do that because it's actually the exchange that has control of the coins. The exchange can be ordered to not release them, or to send them to the FBI's wallet.

      If the *coin is in a private offline wallet in the direct physical control of the subject that's different. In that case, to stop them from spending it would require one of two things:

      A) The big miners agree to blacklist transactions from those wallets, for the betterment of the currency as a whole.

      B) The big exchanges agree not to accept proceeds of transactions from those wallets, reducing their value because who wants BTC that they can't use freely?

      • So how does one confirm a cold wallet actually contains said currency without sending a query and receiving a reply. If the bits n bytes are hot someone is going take a big hit to wash them. Not to mention any risks of physical harm, not everyone investing in cryptocurrency is a nice person.

        • I'm not sure if I following what you mean.

          You know a certain Bitcoin addressn(account number) has a certain amount of BTC because the ledger shows all transfers to and from that address. Example history:

          Deadbeef receives 3 buttcoin from 5he11011 (first transaction for deadbeef)
          Deadbeef sends 1 buttcoin to 65657463

          How many buttcoin does deadbeef have? They got 3, the sent 1 away, so they have 2 left.

          Or are you talking about how one would know that a specific hardware wallet, a given physical device, contain

          • The second part how to confirm a cold wallet contains valid coins without leaving an evidence trail. Be nice to trade crypto offline via sneakernet but if it means I'm going go down for accepting marked coins that sucks. Just saying its not as simple or secure as it's made out to sound and its definitely not anonymous.

            • > Just saying its not as simple or secure as it's made out to sound and its definitely not anonymous.

              Oh for sure it's not anonymous and it's literally the exact OPPOSITE of secret - every transaction is publicly available, for ever.

              As for computer / technical security (my field), security involves three things:

              Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability

              Confidentiality it doesn't have, it's all public

              Integrity (you can know if the data is correct) is the design goal, and it that.

              Availability is 50/50. It's h

  • This just in. $97 million of electricity has been stolen. If found please return to the nearest substation.

    • I keep trying to replace batteries with bitcoins for some reason it shows 0.0v That said could you imagine if we spent the kind of money on energy storage and transfer. Place the amount of power used to create a crypto coin into a device I can use to interchangeably power my life. Kinda like going to purchase bottles water. How we expect to get something of intrinsic value from something that only consumes energy and produces nothing tangible. Let's not forget you actually need electricity to still use cry
  • Another day another exchange done over. Pretty soon these events won't even be newsworthy.
  • Oh sorry folks someone walked away with your bits and bytes we sold you. Nope your cash nor your hash is no longer here, it is however circulating nicely in my wallets.

    • Piracy arguments work just as well. "But I never would have used it", "They're stealing societies electricity" and "It's not a lost transaction".

      • I agree completely. What is happening at the moment in Texas would be considered market manipulation in any other place. Great place to waste energy it seems as soon you consume too much you get paid to stop. Be interesting to see how the relationship between crypto miners and energy markets there. I really can not think of a bigger waste of energy than cryptocurrency, considering there are now over 10000 of them it seems to me it's just a means to create your own currency without providing anything of
    • who needs the FDIC? Freedom baby, freedom. Let it wash over you.
  • Dumb move to keep such an amount in a hot wallet.

  • At some point crypto currencies will become an every day utility. But not before the hyped up space goes through financial ruin and disillusionment of most current owners.

    • Been waiting for it to crash but seems to me someone has figured out it's easier to keep on mining tools for their money. This is very much like trading on the OTC Pink Market but worse as your gambling and the house rules.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by oblom ( 105 )

        Agreed. Globally coordinated pump-n-dump. The good news is, crypto is not immune from liquidity crunches. When the money dries up in the real world every asset goes down. I'd give it another year.

      • The cryptocurrency market today is so blatantly manipulated is not even funny.

        I find it hilarious to see all these people sharing their technical analysis charts on Twitter all day long, only for someone to run a transaction for a couple million and have the value of, say, BTC, slide by 3% and stay there. Turns out trend lines are not very useful in a market without fundamentals.

        • This might have been true five years ago. Currently, there's about $30 billion of BTC being traded daily, a couple million are not going to move the market.

          source: https://bitcoinvisuals.com/mar... [bitcoinvisuals.com]

          • Oh, but they totally do. The only thing forming value for BTC is exchange activity, and those are influenced easily by movements affecting liquidity - i.e. moving BTC in, and out, of them.

            It is pretty revealing to compare exchange liquidity stats vs BTC market value over time.

            • Sure is when every coin or exchange has the same graphs. I can say I do know several folks that have managed to make some hard money and are now playing with house money in the cryptocurrency marketplace so there is something to it.

  • Come on Slashies, you can do better than this.

  • the number of crypto exchanges I heard got hacked or linked sensitive info is growing every month. I don't understand why people can't do some basic research before getting on this train. [nativecasinos.ca]
  • Same news from 2-weeks ago. In Slashdot. Runnin' out of data are we?
  • that's why i'm not buying into it. it's a baseless currency.
  • Cryptocurrency was suppose to be safe ! Over and over again, cryptocurrency / crypto exchanges security have failed ! This is a continuing red flag that something based on nothing is a fool's venture and cannot be secured. Just a bunch of hype to take suckers money !

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