Bitfinex CTO Reveals Failed $15B Worth XRP Transfer Attack on Exchange

• Whale Alert claimed to have seen a transfer of 25.6 billion XRP to Bitfinex.
• The same hacker also tried to target Binance, this time with a transfer of 58.9 billion XRP.

Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino said that a “partial payments exploit” trying to transfer over $15 billion worth of XRP (XRP) from an unidentified wallet to Bitfinex on January 14 never materialized.

Blockchain monitoring firm Whale Alert was the first to bring attention to the move. Whale Alert claimed to have seen a transfer of 25.6 billion XRP, or roughly half of XRP’s circulating quantity, from an unknown wallet to Bitfinex.

When Whale Alert realized that certain incorrect postings were caused by a difficulty with correctly interpreting the Ripple node response, they promptly withdrew the post.

Partial Payments Exploit

Ardoino continued by saying that hackers attempted to exploit Bitfinex using a “Partial Payments Exploit,” with the intention of taking advantage of the exchange’s misconfigured software to handle partial payments.

Moreover, assuming an exchange has a misconfigured system that can only read the amount field of an XRP transaction—which is often set to a large amount—is the starting point for a partial payments attack. Actually, the exploiter tries to get credit for the difference by sending over a much lesser amount that is indicated in another transaction field.

But Ardoino pointed out that Bitfinex “properly handles the ‘delivered_amount’ data field,” hence the assault was unsuccessful. Blockchain records show that the same hacker also tried to target Binance, this time with a transfer of 58.9 billion XRP, but was also unsuccessful.

In the middle of all this, a massive XRP whale transaction was registered. An anonymous wallet dumped over 26 million XRP tokens, valued at about $15.16 million onto Bitstamp.

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