Altcoin News: GateHub Users Lost 23 Million XRP Due to “Potential Security Breach”

June 6, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

The creative director of 2K/DENMARK company, Thomas Silkjær, described the “potential security breach” of the GateHub service, which caused users to lose up to 23 million XRP ($9.3 million).

GateHub is a wallet for storing popular cryptocurrencies and has its own built-in exchange.

According to Silkjær, evidence of an attack was seen on June 1 in a 201,000 XRP transaction, transferred between two wallets.

“ It turned out that the account robbed was managed through Gatehub.net, and that the offending account (r9do2Ar8k64NxgLD6oJoywaxQhUS57Ck8k) had stolen substantial amounts from several other XRP accounts, likely to be or have been managed through Gatehub.net,” writes Silkjær.

In total, the attackers used 12 addresses and removed 23.2 million XRP from 80–90 wallets of the victims. According to the analyst, 13 million XRP of this amount has already been liquidated on the exchanges or passed through services-mixers.

Yellow: Exchanges and accounts used to cash out. Blue: Victims. Red: 9 suspected accounts

Note: A few victims may have not been channeled through the suspect accounts and have had funds sent directly to exchanges. Image credit: Thomas Silkjær

However, the methods of the attack could not be determined. Silkjær admits that it could be phishing, GateHub hacking, encryption manipulations, etc.

Representatives of GateHub commented on the current situation on the XRP Chat forum, acknowledging the problem, but they also cannot fully describe the principles of this attack.

Author: Marko Vidrih