Cybersecurity specialist James Edwards believes that the Wintermute market maker could not have been attacked from the outside, since the attacker withdrew the assets using the administrator’s private key.
ZeroNoncense blog editor James Edwards stated that the hack appears to have been carried out after observing the interaction of the platform’s smart contracts. According to him, all this indicates that the hacker is a member of the Wintermute team. Edwards questioned the transparency of the entire project, pointing out that the team did not make the compromised smart contract code publicly available.
After a more detailed study of the hack, the expert found that the decompiled code did not match the compromised code. Edwards also called Wintermute CEO and founder Yevgeny Gaev’s explanation “hurried and carelessly published”. According to the analyst, it seems that the team “relaxed” after stealing millions of dollars.
Edwards stated that the transfer of funds to a smart contract, allegedly created and controlled by a hacker, is unprovable and controversial. A study of the transaction history showed the transfer of assets from the Binance and Kraken exchanges to a compromised smart contract that could have been initiated from exchange accounts controlled by the team.
Last week, the CEO of Wintermute, one of the largest cryptocurrency market makers, reported that the company had been hacked. The attackers managed to withdraw assets worth $160 million. Recently, it became known that hackers who stole about $1 million from an Ethereum address generated using the Profanity service used the same method used by the criminals who hacked Wintermute.
