US Attorney’s Office Indicts Two Suspects in EtherDelta Hack

Published at: Sept. 23, 2019

The United States attorney's office for the Northern District of California has indicted two suspects — Elliot Gunton and Anthony Tyler Nashatka — for hacking EtherDelta, a non-custodial marketplace for trading Ethereum (ETH) ERC-20 tokens, in December 2017.

According to the documents originally filed on Aug. 13, Ganton and Nashatka changed the settings of EtherDelta’s domain name system to mislead users and collect their crypto addresses, private keys and to withdraw funds.

A fake website

The suspects managed to gain access to the settings using the phone number of one of the EtherDelta employees and used it to hack their email address. After that, Gunton and Nashatka reportedly changed the parameters of the domain system in such a way as to redirect traffic from EtherDelta to a fake website that resembled a real EtherDelta platform.

Visitors of this fake website could reveal their private keys and potentially lose their cryptocurrency assets. According to the prosecution, the losses of one of the EtherDelta users amounted to at least $800,000. The total amount of stolen funds was not disclosed in the court document.

As Cointelegraph reported in August, Chinese police was reportedly investigating EtherDelta in connection with an apparent exit scam.

Tags
Related Posts
Hacker makes off with $5.7M after ransacking social token platform
Social token platform Roll suffered a hot wallet breach, resulting in hackers draining at least 3,000 ETH worth $5.7 million on March 15. At roughly 8am UTC, digital asset management platform MyCrypto reported that a hacker may have compromised the private keys for Roll’s hot wallet, allowing them to transfer funds from users’ accounts at will. After approximately 12 hours, Roll responded to the attack, announcing the hacker had stolen and liquidated a large number of tokens, and that withdrawals had been suspended across the platform: “The attacker has sold all the tokens. There is no further user action suggested.” …
Blockchain / March 16, 2021
The impact of Bitcoin hacking incidents on the crypto market
In the 2013–2017 period, 29 hacks occurred in the Bitcoin market where a total of 1.1 million Bitcoin were stolen. Noting that the average price for Bitcoin (BTC) in December 2020 exceeded $20,000, the corresponding monetary equivalent of losses is more than $22 billion, which strongly highlights the societal impact of this criminal activity. What did crypto exchanges do to address this problem? Nowadays, about 90% of exchanges use some kind of cold storage system, which means that digital assets are stored offline. Keeping Bitcoin offline considerably reduces the threat from hacking attacks. Related: Roundup of crypto hacks, exploits and …
Blockchain / Jan. 24, 2021
Multichain under fire from users as hacking losses grow to $3M
Hackers have continued to exploit a critical vulnerability in the cross-chain router protocol (CRP) Multichain that first appeared on Jan 17. Earlier this week, Multichain urged users to revoke approvals for six tokens to protect their assets from being exploited by malicious individuals. However Multichain's announcement on Jan. 17 encouraged more hackers to try the exploit. One stole $1.43 million, another offered to return 80% while keeping the rest as a tip. According to Tal Be’ery, the co-founder of the ZenGo wallet, the stolen amount has now risen to $3 million. The @MultichainOrg hack is far from being over. Over …
Blockchain / Jan. 20, 2022
Jump Crypto replenishes funds from $320M Wormhole hack in largest-ever DeFi 'bailout'
On Thursday, Jump Crypto, a crypto venture capital firm that owns Certus One, the developer of the Wormhole token bridge, announced it had deposited 120 thousand Ether (ETH) into a Solana-Ethereum bridge that suffered a devastating exploit. The day prior, hackers fraudulently minted 120 thousand wrapped Ether (wETH) worth $321 million on the Solana (SOL) platform, then redeemed 93,750 wETH for ETH on the Ethereum network while swapping the rest for other altcoins on the Solana network. The cross-chain ETH-wETH is supposed to have an exchange ratio of 1:1 against one another. Therefore, unauthorized minting of wETH leads to significant …
Technology / Feb. 3, 2022
STEPN impersonators stealing users' seed phrases, warn security experts
Peckshield, a prominent blockchain security firm, exposed the existence of numerous phishing websites for the Web3 lifestyle app STEPN on Monday. Hackers insert a forged MetaMask browser plugin through which they can steal seed phrases from unsuspecting STEPN users, according to Peckshield. When these cybercriminals obtain the seed phrase, they gain complete control over the STEPN user's dashboard where they may connect their stolen wallets to their own or "claim" a giveaway as per Peckshield. #PeckShieldAlert #phishing PeckShield has detected a bath of @Stepnofficial phishing sites. They insert a false Metamask browser extension leading to stealing your seed phrase or …
Adoption / April 25, 2022