Bitfinex wallet hacker returns most of $20 million to US government
On October 24, 2016, the malicious actor who drained the US government wallet containing funds seized from the 2016 Bitfinex hack to the tune of $20 million returned $19.3 million to the government wallet in less than 24 hours.
According to Arkham Intelligence, several wallets controlled by the hacker returned the funds to US government wallets starting with the characters “0xc9E”. At the time of writing, 88% of the funds have been refunded.
The Onchain hacker recovered approximately 2,412 Ether (ETH), 7,200 USD Coin (USDC) and $13.2 million in Ave-staked USDC (aUSDC). Blockchain sleuth ZackXBT said the recovered funds do not include the roughly $700,000 the hacker sent to speed exchanges.
The identity of the hacker and the motivation behind the attack are currently unknown, but the incident shows a growing trend of hacking and exploitation in the third quarter of 2024.
A US government wallet containing funds seized from the 2016 Bitfinex hack. Source: Arkham Intelligence
Related: US Government Crypto Wallets Hacked for $20M – Arkham Intelligence
October hacking and malicious attacks
On October 16, Radiant Capital's cross-chain lending protocol was exploited and $50 million was invested. The hacker compromised Radiant Capital's contracts on the BNB Smart Chain and Arbitrum networks by obtaining the private keys needed to sign transactions from Radiant Capital's multisignature wallet.
About a week after the exploit, the hacker transferred $52 million in funds to the Ethereum network – making it extremely difficult to recover the stolen funds.
The following day, the decentralized trading protocol Ambient Finance suffered a head-on attack on its website. According to the Ambient Finance team, a hacker compromised the website's domain in an isolated incident that did not affect the protocol. Ambient Finance later regained control of the domain and restored website service to users.
Rescheduling service eigenlayer was the victim of a similar hack on October 18, when a threat actor took over the eigenlayer X social media account and distributed malicious airline links to unsuspecting users. The fake airdrop link was only live for a few minutes before it was deleted and the account is now working normally.
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