Mercado Bitcoin hack: more than $40 million drained from at least ten blockchains

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The security company Hypernative monitors blockchains continuously and its alert, relayed on Telegram by Wu Blockchain, provides an initial assessment. According to its initial analyses, more than 40 million dollars left wallets allocated to the platform to reach brand new addresses, created for the occasion.

These movements span at least ten blockchains. Among them, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, Tron, Polygon, Arbitrum, Avalanche, BNB Chain and Stellar.

Upon arrival, the attacker's wallet would hold approximately 2,852 ether (ETH). He also allegedly pocketed 106 bitcoins (BTC), divided into seven transactions.

Added to this are 10,700 SOL and a set of smaller assets. Hypernative lists more than 200 different tokens in total. Most of the movement was concentrated on 34 minutes, Monday November 2 in the early morning. Scans of bitcoin deposit addresses had begun earlier in the night.

An hour and a half after its press release, Mercado Bitcoin published the destination addresses of the alleged attacker. Objective: to allow other platforms to identify and track funds.

The modus operandi is intriguing. Hypernative talks about “ordinary transfers”, not a smart contract exploit. Each transfer was signed with the platform's legitimate keys, as if it had been authorized. A private key acts as a signature on a blockchain, and whoever holds it can move funds as they wish.

For example, a transfer signed with the correct secret code appears perfectly normal to the bank. The investigation will have to establish how the attacker obtained this signing power, between exposed private keys and faulty infrastructure, two avenues still open.

For its part, Mercado Bitcoin has not confirmed any of these figures, and has given neither official amount, nor system in question, nor recovery date. The platform assured that it quickly contained the incident and traced the assets, in coordination with the authorities.

Official communication: We identify and report quickly a security incident in one of our systems is not correct. We insist that: • We do not have any prejudice to our customers; • Não houve vazamento de dados. How to prevent protection, deposits and bags…

The attack comes four days after the Binance hack on October 29, without any link having been established between the two cases.

Regardless, Brazilians had already flocked to USDT after the collapse of the real. The real test will come when withdrawals reopen, when each customer will want to check for themselves.

Machine-translated from French