Crypto Exchange Bybit announced Friday that a “sophisticated attack” led to the theft of Ethereum (ETH) from one of the company’s offline wallets.
Bybit CEO and co-founder Ben Zhou said in the live stream that the hackers stole around 401,346 ETH.
Both crypto security company Elliptic and crypto security researcher ZachxBT said the total amount of stolen ETH is worth around $1.4 billion, the largest known cipher theft in history. The best previous cryptographic violations were hacking against Ronin and poly networks. The result was a loss of $624 million and $6111 million, respectively, according to data collected by Rekt, a website that tracks Web3 and Crypto breaches.
“In fact, it could be the biggest single theft ever,” Elliptic co-founder and chief scientist Tom Robinson told firememecoins, referring to all sorts of theft, not just data breaches.
According to Financial News Site World Finance, the nearly $1 billion withdrawal from the Central Bank of Iraq, ahead of Bybit’s violation, is said to be the largest bank robbery in history.
Zhou writes that hackers “control” one of the company’s cold wallets and refer to digital wallets that store cryptocurrency, but in theory they are not connected to the internet and have transferred the funds to an online “warm” wallet.
When contacted for comment, Bybit spokesman Tony Au mentioned Zhou’s public disclosure. In one post, Zhou wrote that even if the stolen funds cannot be recovered, the company is “solvent” and “can cover the losses.”
According to CoinmarketCap, BYBIT, based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, had estimated its total assets of $16 billion last week.
With everything in 2024 in mind, the total amount of codes that hackers were stolen was around $2.2 billion in all of 2024, according to blockchain tracking company Chain Orisis. Also, in 2023, it was estimated at around $2 billion, according to multiple estimates.
