Users of Atomic Wallet stole $35 million. What hinders the investigation At MatchSystems, they said that the developers of the cryptocurrency wallet Atomic do not cooperate in the investigation of the theft of $35 million Representatives of analytical companies note that the wallet developers do not cooperate in the investigation and refuse to provide data confirming their statements about hacking
In early June, users of the popular crypto wallet Atomic Wallet faced massive thefts of cryptocurrency. The first one happened on June 2. Since then, several analysts have tracked thefts totaling more than $35 million. The wallet team said they were investigating the hack, but at the time of publication, they did not report any details of the incident.
Atomic is a non-custodial crypto wallet. Unlike exchanges, such wallets allow users to store funds independently of a third party. The service was originally launched in 2017 as a cryptocurrency exchange called Atomic Swap. According to the official website, Atomic Wallet has more than 5 million users.
Despite the fact that open source is considered the standard in cryptocurrencies, Atomic Wallet has always kept its code closed, including independent auditors. Some crypto projects prefer not to disclose their code to avoid copying by competitors. However, since users cannot view the code, they cannot verify that it actually works as it should and does not contain vulnerabilities. Instead, they have to trust the developers.
adv.rbc.ru “Details are carefully hidden” The transparency of the blockchain as a public ledger of transfers in cryptocurrencies allows you to identify the addresses of affected wallets and further movement of funds. According to an analysis by a well-known online detective in the crypto community under the pseudonym ZachXBT, hackers stole about $35 million in different cryptocurrencies. The victims also contacted the researcher, providing him with data on transactions on the wallet. During the hack, funds were stolen in cryptocurrencies Ethereum (ETH), Dogecoin (DOGE), Litecoin (LTC), BNB (BNB), and Polygon (MATIC), and one of the victims lost crypto assets worth $8 million.
As reported by blockchain analysts Elliptic, the hacker used a popular crypto mixer among hackers from North Korea Sinbad.io to launder stolen funds. Based on investigations of previous large hacks, investigators calculated that the North Korean hacker group Lazarus Group laundered more than $100 million through it. Analysts did not name the amount of funds transferred through the mixer by Atomic users but said that Sinbad.io is likely a revamped version of Blender.io - a service actively used by Lazarus Group and the first mixer to be sanctioned by the US Treasury Department.
“As far as we know, during the investigation from the side of Atomic Wallet management, several companies engaged in tracking cryptocurrencies and digital assets were contacted. Assistance from their side is aimed at marking stolen assets, but any details of the technical side of the incident are carefully hidden,” MatchSystems CEO According to him, this does not allow an independent assessment of the hack. In addition, none of the companies announced that they were investigating the technical side, and Atomic Wallet team did not comment on offers for free investigation of the incident.
To investigate, you need to get the so-called server logs - a journal of activity, in which all user actions on the site are logged. According to Kutin, Atomic Wallet refuses to provide the necessary files to both his company and others, despite numerous requests.
The Atomic Wallet team “is doing everything possible” to return the stolen funds, but creating a specific plan is only possible after the investigation is completed, said Roland Sede, marketing director of Atomic Wallet, in a comment for Cointelegraph. According to him, tracking illegal transfers by victims of the attack and reporting them to crypto exchanges could have prevented fraudsters from withdrawing funds. The platform does the same, because “the more attention is paid to hackers, the harder it is for them to move them (funds)”, Sede said.
Not the first time On June 8, Atomic Wallet representatives announced that Chainalisys is helping to investigate the incident. According to the team, as a result of the hack, “less than 1%” of monthly active users of the service were affected, and the attack was stopped on Saturday, June 3. But users on Twitter in response to this message posted screenshots showing that their funds were stolen later than the specified time.
In the comments of the social forum Reddit, users also write about the disappearance of funds. One of them said that someone posing as a wallet technical support employee wrote on an anonymous forum 4chan that the team turned off notifications on the mobile version of the wallet before hacking and posted two photos of a monitor (one, two), on which allegedly opened interface of wallet support service, where requests from users accumulate at the time of the incident. It was not possible to confirm the authenticity of the stated information, and the author of the publication was blocked by moderators of the site.
On Reddit itself, for several years there have been messages about the disappearance of funds in cryptocurrency from Atomic Wallet, but with a detailed consideration it turns out that often users find viruses in computers or become victims of
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