Other 2000 ETH stolen from the Upbit were moved to an unknown wallet by the hackers

By Emma 12/23/19 3:13 PM

Upbit, a Korean exchange that witnessed a significant hack on November 27, resulted in $ 50 million ETH (342,000 ETH) disappearing. Since the hack, many exchanges have frozen the movement of stolen funds. However, that hasn’t stopped a hacker trying to transfer these funds to various unknown wallets.

Hackers continue to move ETH stolen from Upbit

Whale Alert reports that an additional portion of this stolen amount was transferred today, December 23.

⚠ 2,000 #ETH (264,388 USD) of stolen funds transferred from Upbit Hack Nov 2019 to unknown wallet

Tx: https://t.co/cEh0sICQwk

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) December 23, 2019

The sender’s wallet address is identified as, 0xB3A9B79F4D5Dc2cdcdc00dA22869502CBF65A0a5, through which the hackers sent 2,000 ETH ($ 264,388) to an unknown wallet address- 0x9878. The recipient’s wallet held a deposit of 1,500 ETH ($ 198,855) and received payment from the hacker’s address. After transferring 2,000 ETH, the address transferred a portion of this money to another wallet.

Source: Etherscan

This fairly new address has accounts of 13 transactions, mostly to and from hacker wallets. Meanwhile, the sender address has held 13,171 ETH ($ 1,747,660) and has been dormant for more than two weeks.

According to Twitter user alias Alpesh Valaki, the hacker is sending to Binance.

he is moving it to Binance.https://t.co/oVkH8fBe0H

— Alpesh Valaki (@advalaki) December 23, 2019

Right from the moment the Upbit hack was ‘exposed,’ Binance pledged to freeze money if deposited on their exchange. Currently, it is not clear whether Binance will respond immediately when the transfer was reported a few hours ago. Binance, in general, allows transfers between accounts, which means that hackers can withdraw money from another specially selected account. Some smaller transactions have been directed to the Binance1 wallet Ethereum.

Three weeks ago, on December 3, hackers transferred 11,001 Ether ($ 1,639,222 million) and made a test transaction by sending 1,001 Ether to the same wallet. Initially, the hackers played ‘cat and mouse’ with a small number of Ether like 0.00001337, where 1337 stood for ‘leetspeek,’ a fake language used to refer to ‘elite hackers.’ The attacker is said to have split the money to be easier to disperse and have more than 50 accounts.

According to CryptoTicker, OTC methods on the dark web are a commonly used method to liquidate money. However, if attackers transfer tokens through privacy-focused coins like Monero, Dash, or Zcash, it may be difficult to recover the losses.

Hack the exchange accelerated in 2019

The Upbit hack is only part of a long chain of losses from exchanges, accelerating in 2019.
Upbit’s case is not a hack, and so far, there is no official story yet. Still, the general explanation was due to human error and took place during maintenance of the exchange, causing an amount of Ethereum to vanish without a trace.

Jameson Lopp, who maximizes Bitcoin, has been following the trend of hacking cryptocurrencies in 2019. He noted that burglaries now rarely target BTC, despite the high value.

An interesting point I noticed while researching reported bitcoin thefts: while the number of hacked crypto exchanges increases every year, fewer and fewer of the hacks steal bitcoin. It looks like 75% of exchange hacks in 2019 only resulted in the loss of altcoins.

— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) December 17, 2019

BTC is usually more closely guarded, and also more transparent to follow and more known. But altcoins are generally easier to disguise and can be sold on small exchanges.

Exchange hacks have a clear uptrend, especially after the assets are overvalued from 2017 onwards.

Ethereum remains one of the best used, highly liquid, and can be exchanged through DEX without significant traces.