Nexus Mutual was created to protect DeFi investors against hacks. Now the CEO of the platform himself has fallen victim to an attack.
A spectacular hack caused a sensation in the DeFi space. The team from the DeFi platform Nexus Mutual announced the theft of 370,000 NXMs by tweet on December 14th. The platform’s own tokens come from a private wallet owned by Nexus CEO Hugh Karp. On Monday, it was worth $ 8.2 million.
Nexus Mutual acts as a community solution to minimize risk in the DeFi sector. Investors can secure their smart contracts there against hacks and errors. The renewed attack is, therefore, not without a certain irony. Meanwhile, the Nexus Mutual team assured that user deposits were not affected by the attack.
It appears that the attacker gained access to Karp’s device. There he installed a modified version of the MetaMask wallet service. Although Karp stored his tokens in a hardware wallet, the hacker was able to trick him into a transaction to confirm who sent all of his NXM tokens to the attackers.
Meanwhile, it is explosive that only registered Nexus Mutual users are able to receive NXM tokens and convert them into the freely exchangeable variant wrapped NXM (wNXM). The hacker must have gone through the platform’s know-your-customer procedure. Since his identity has still not been established, identity theft does not seem to be ruled out. Karp and his team work together with the investigative authorities. There is evidence that he was able to determine the attacker’s IP.
Karp had already congratulated the hacker on his dubious success on Monday. In a tweet, he promised a reward of $ 300,000 and the waiver of a display in return for returning the tokens.
However, the hacker has other plans. According to transaction data, $ 2.7 million has already been laundered. In a message dated December 16, which was included in the input data of an Ether transaction, he asked for $ 3 million as a ransom for the remaining tokens:
Hi Hugh. I will not sell wNXM anymore until wNXM regains its value or you send me 4.5k ETH. If you need any kind of negotiation with me, send a msg [message] to my eth address.
As a result of the hack, the wNXM course had stumbled for the past few days. The sudden sale of such a large amount of tokens could push the price even further towards zero.
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