On-chain ransom negotiations show ShibaSwap hacker won’t be low-balled
On-chain messages between hacker and victim reveal a ransom standoff, with every demand etched permanently on the blockchain. Last Friday, $2.8 million worth of (mostly dog-themed) crypto tokens were stolen from ShibaSwap, a “next generation decentralized exchange” for the Shiba Inu ecosystem. Among the loot were approximately 250 billion KNINE tokens, from liquid staking protocol K9 Finance. K9 wants them back, and is willing to pay the hacker a bounty. The tokens are ostensibly worth over $600,000 at current market prices . Though a simulated swap, through extremely thin liquidity, paints a rather different picture. The hack was flagged by security firms Peckshield and Tikkala Security and involved using a “flash” loan to buy up enough tokens to achieve “majority validator power.” Then, the hacker signed “a malicious state to drain assets from the bridge.” They subsequently split up most of the stolen assets between various addresses but ...