The hackers that rattled the DeFi community are reportedly moving the stolen funds to the TornadaoCash. This comes in the wake of the November 2023 Heco Bridge hack which resulted in a loss of around $111 million. The stolen funds included Ethereum, USDT, USDC and HBTC. These tokens were sent to decentralized exchanges and swapped for other tokens at that time.
$145 million of Ether on the move
The data shared by PeckShieldAlert depicts that Heco bride exploiters had transferred around 40k Ethereum (approx worth $145.7 million) to the Tornado Cash mixer. It added that the hackers moved these assets in the last 8 days.
As reported earlier, the hack targeting the Heco chain bridge resulted in a $87 million loss. However, the attack then extended to HTX’s hot wallets which led to an additional $12 million theft. The hack came to light when $87 million was siphoned off through the Heco chain bridge.
The reports revealed that the main address associated with the exploit is 0xfc146d1caf6ba1d1ce6dcb5b35dcbf895f50b0c4. This wallet address received a huge amount of illicit funds. However, 0xe47e6dA16Bb83EB0FD26b3F29b15CE8Fab089B9e held approximately $63 million worth of cryptos at that time.
It was later revealed that the attackers transferred assets to externally owned accounts (EOAs). It was then exchanged for Ethereum (ETH). HTX crypto exchange, also a victim, lost about $12 million from its hot wallets.
In response, the HTX team transferred all remaining funds from some of their hot wallets to a Huobi Recovery address.
What was behind the hack?
Experts suggest that compromised private keys became a common factor in these breaches. The hack echoed vulnerabilities seen in a previous $125 million hack that happened on Poloniex. Interestingly this is another venture associated with Justin Sun.
Sun came to a rescue and assured the community that HTX would fully compensate for the losses. However, an ongoing investigation was launched to uncover the reason behind the exploit.
It is important to note that two crypto platforms linked to Justin Sun were targeted in the back to back exploits. It went to an estimated $115 million stolen to date.
On the market side, the second largest crypto, Ethereum (ETH) continued it downturn on Friday. ETH price dropped by more than 3% in the last 24 hours which added to a drop of 8% record over the past 7 days.
ETH is trading at an average price of $3,412, at the press time. Its 24 hour trading volume is down by 35% to stand at $19.6 billion.
