$46 Million of Stolen Assets Moved by Wormhole Hacker

• The Wormhole attack was the third-largest crypto hack in 2022.
• The hacker appears to be seeking yield or arbitrage opportunities on their stolen loot.

On-chain data shows that another $46 million of stolen assets has been migrated from the hacker’s wallet, indicating that the stolen cryptocurrency from one of the industry’s greatest attacks is on the move again. In February of last year, an exploit of Wormhole’s token bridge led to the third-largest crypto breach of the year: the Wormhole assault. There was a loss of around $321 million worth of Wrapped ETH (wETH).

Since the attack occurred after an update was made to the project’s GitHub repository, it is likely that the vulnerability was exploited. The assault was uncovered on February 2 after a tweet from the Wormhole account indicated the network was “down for maintenance” while an exploit was investigated.

PeckShield, a blockchain security company, reports that the hacker’s linked wallet is now again operational, transacting $46 million worth of cryptocurrencies.

Trying to Make Profit or Arbitrage Opportunity

About $41.4 million worth of Ethereum staking tokens (wstETH) were transferred to MakerDAO via Lido Finance, while another $5 million were transferred from Rocket Pool to MakerDAO in the form of 3,000 rETH.

According to PeckShield’s analysis, the stolen assets were sold for 16.6 million DAI, suggesting the hacker is looking to make a profit or find an arbitrage opportunity. The MakerDAO stablecoin was then used to purchase 9,750 ETH at a price of around $1,537, plus 1,000 stETH. This was then wrapped into 9,700 wstETH.

Just a few weeks ago, the hacker transferred another $155 million worth of Ethereum to a decentralized exchange, thus this current transfer of assets comes as no surprise. Lido’s stETH and wstETH, as well as 95,630 ETH, were converted to ETH-pegged assets on the OpenOcean DEX on January 24.

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