Hugh Brooks, director of security operations at CertiK, said the hackers who stole more than $400 million from FTX and FTX US in November may have taken advantage of the hype surrounding the Sam Bankman-Fried fraud trial to further obfuscate the funds.
Just days before Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial was to begin, the FTX hacker known as the “FTX Drainer” began transferring millions of ether obtained from the November attack.
These movements continued throughout the trial.In the past three days, hackers transfer in Approximately 15,000 ETH (worth approximately $24 million) to three new wallet addresses.
“As the FTX trial begins and receives widespread public attention and media coverage, the individuals responsible for draining the funds may feel increased urgency to conceal assets,” Brooks said.
“It’s also possible that FTX churners are assuming that the trial will monopolize so much attention from the Web3 industry that there won’t be enough bandwidth to track all of the stolen funds while also covering the trial.”
FTX, once valued at $32 billion, declared bankruptcy on November 11. On the same day, FTX employees began noticing large amounts of funds being withdrawn from the exchange’s wallets.
October 9 Report Reports from Wired magazine provide new insights into what happened the night of the attack.
After FTX employees realized an attacker had full access to a range of wallets, the team declared “the fox is in the henhouse” and scrambled to prevent remaining funds from falling into the hands of the hackers.
The team reportedly decided to transfer a staggering amount of remaining funds ($400 to $500 million) to a privately owned Ledger cold wallet while awaiting a response from BitGo, the company tasked with safeguarding the exchange’s assets after the transaction is completed . Bankruptcy.
The move could prevent attackers from gaining as much as $1 billion in attacks.
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At the same time, Brooks explained, hackers appear to have changed their methods of hiding funds.
On November 21, FTX hackers were caught trying to launder money using the “stripping chain” method, which involves sending a small amount of funds to a new wallet and then “stripping” the smaller amount to the new wallet.
However, Brooks said hackers have recently used a more sophisticated method to conceal the transfer of illicit assets.
Funds stored in the original Bitcoin wallet were distributed across multiple wallets, moving smaller portions of funds to a series of additional wallets, a strategy that “significantly lengthened” the tracking process.
Brooks said they have not yet identified any individuals or groups who may be behind the FTX hack, and the investigation is ongoing.
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