Hacker Takes Advantage of Wormhole to Move $155M in Largest Crypto Heist in Recent Months

The hacker behind the $321 million Wormhole bridge attack has shifted a large chunk of stolen funds, with transaction data showing that $155 million worth of Ether (ETH) was transferred to a decentralized exchange (DEX) on January 23.

The Wormhole hack, which took place on Feb 2, 2022, was the third largest crypto hack of the year and resulted in the loss of 120,000 Wrapped ETH (wETH) worth around $321 million.

According to the transaction history of the hacker’s alleged wallet address, the latest activity shows that 95,630 ETH was sent to the OpenOcean DEX and then subsequently converted into ETH-pegged assets such as Lido Finance’s staked ETH (stETH) and wrapped staked (wstETH).

Crypto community members have also highlighted that the hacker conducted a series of odd transactions, such as using their stETH holdings as collateral to borrow 13 million worth of the DAI stablecoin, before swapping it out for more stETH, wrapping into stETH again and then borrowing some more DAI.

In response to the hack, the Wormhole team has again offered a bounty of $10 million to the hacker if they return all the funds, after leaving an embedded message in a transaction via the Wormhole: Deployer.

The hacker’s transaction has also had an impact on the price of stETH, according to data from Dune Analytics.

The asset’s price went from slightly under peg of 0.9962 ETH on Jan. 23, to as high as 1.0002 ETH the following day, before dropping back to 0.9981 at the time of writing.

Blockchain security firms such as Ancilia, Inc. have warned that searching the keywords “Wormhole Bridge” in Google is currently showing promoted ad websites that are actually phishing operations.