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- 1 Angel Drainer reportedly wiped out $400,000 from approximately 128 crypto wallets on February 12, 2024.
- 2 Bad actors already made the deployment; unknowingly, the users permitted a ‘Permit-2’ transaction, which resulted in severe losses to them.
- 3 As per the study of Chainalysis, more than $1.7 Billion of crypto went off the market in 2023.
The entire cryptocurrency market is troubled by unethical hackers; as per recent information, Angel Drainer, a crypto phishing group, wiped out over $400k from around 128 wallets.
Angel Drainer stole the holdings from the wallet after deploying the malicious vault contract.
On February 13, Blockaid, a blockchain security firm, wrote in an X post that “Angel Drainer began with a new attack vector that exploits Etherscan verification tools to conceal the malicious characteristics of the smart contracts.
The firm further adds that the exploit occurred “At 6:41am UTC on Monday, February 12, Angel Drainer group deployed a Safe vault contract— 0xbaee148df4bf81abf9854c9087f0d3a0ffd93dbb— which they have since used to phish and scam users, prompting them to sign a Permit2 with this Safe Vault as the operator.”
Blockaid said, “This is not an attack on Safe […]. Rather, they decided to use this Safe vault contract because Etherscan automatically adds a verification flag to Safe contracts, which can provide a false sense of security as it’s unrelated to validating whether or not the contract is malicious.”
The users fell victim as they were unaware that bad actors already made the deployment; unknowingly, they permitted a ‘Permit-2’ transaction, resulting in severe losses.
Blockaid, in its February 5 ‘X’ post, wrote “Angel Drainers has wiped out over $25 Million from approximately 35k crypto wallets in a short period of time.”
Impacts of Hacks and Frauds on the Crypto Market
Following the advancement in the cryptocurrency industry, hackers also evolved at a similar pace, now helping them make crypto users victims. If bad actors continue to trouble the market, the overall user base is expected to decline.
As per the study of Chainalysis, more than $1.7 Billion of crypto went off the market in 2023. If the history of the cryptocurrency market is written, there will be a separate lesson for the hacks and scams in the industry.
Crypto Market Price Update
The cryptocurrency market capitalization has shown significant improvements in the past few days. It grew over 17% in the past seven days and was $1.97 Trillion as of writing.
Similarly, the cryptocurrency market leader, Bitcoin (BTC), has shown impressive improvements in price, market capitalization, and trading volume. BTC is trading at $52,321 with an intraday surge of 1.29% and a weekly growth of 17.14%.
Some market observers claim that the growing ETF category in the crypto solely backs the sudden and positivity in the market. Earlier this month, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved the much-awaited BTC spot ETF.
Moreover, some other market enthusiasts urge that the growth of the market and other tokens is backed by the upcoming 4th Bitcoin halving, likely to occur in April 2024. A date is yet to be announced, but as per analysts April 19, 2024 is the likely date.
Steefan George is a crypto and blockchain enthusiast, with a remarkable grasp on market and technology. Having a graduate degree in computer science and an MBA in BFSI, he is an excellent technology writer at The Coin Republic. He is passionate about getting a billion of the human population onto Web3. His principle is to write like “explaining to a 6-year old”, so that a layman can learn the potential of, and get benefitted from this revolutionary technology.
