Famous for offering free withdrawals, the FTX exchange has been under an unusual attack in recent days. In total, information from X-explore estimates that the losses have already exceeded 81 ETH, approximately BRL 541,000 in the current conversion.
To understand the attack, one needs to know more about the token called XEN Crypto (XEN). Basically, such a token can be received by paying fees on Ethereum, a strange but different project.
While FTX does not have the token to trade on its market, the attackers took advantage of the free withdrawal fee to perform over 17,000 trades to receive XEN tokens.
Attacks started on Monday (10), source says
Call theft vulnerability gas — that is, values that determine the Ethereum speed — such a failure has already resulted in over 81 ETH (R$541,000) in losses for the FTX broker. Also keep in mind that the attack is still ongoing.
Moving on, X-explore explains that the hacker managed to earn 61 ETH (BRL 400.00) by selling the newly minted XEN tokens on decentralized exchanges.
Interestingly, the attacker later moved some of these funds to his own FTX account.
The analysis points out that FTX has no restriction on recording addresses, that is, they can also be created for smart contracts, allowing the action to be performed.
“The outbound hot wallet address of the FTX exchange made sequential small ETH transfers of about 0.0035 ETH to the staking contract, as shown below.”
It is then shown that each of these contracts creates more subcontracts and that all network fees are paid by FTX itself, which is probably unaware of what happened.
Other points mentioned by the analysis are the lack of gas broker withdrawals, which can be as much as 24 times the standard 21,000. As well as the lack of FTX monitoring on different recordings to the same address.
So far, neither FTX nor its CEO Sam Bankman-Fried have commented on the matter, suggesting the brokerage is still unaware of the attack.
As for the XEN token, it has already lost 41% of its value in the last 24 hours due to large sales by the attacker.
Source: Live Coins
John Cameron is a journalist at The Nation View specializing in world news and current events, particularly in international politics and diplomacy. With expertise in international relations, he covers a range of topics including conflicts, politics and economic trends.
