Hackers Stole About $32M in Ethereum Tokens Last Week

Hackers stole more than 150,000 ethereum tokens on Wednesday, worth about $32 million, CNBC reports.

The theft included 44,055 tokens taken from Swarm City, a decentralized commerce platform. Matthew Carano, a communications officer for Swarm City, addressed the cyber crime in a blog post on Wednesday.

At approximately 12:30 PM ET Bernd Lapp, Business Hive leader noticed that the entire contents of the Swarm City ETH multisig wallet had been drained. Bernd checked the receiving address and noticed a few very large transactions had hit the same wallet. We alerted the Ethereum Foundation and multiple developer groups immediately. Together, we were able to determine that malicious actors had exploited a flaw in the Parity Multisig code, which allowed a known party to steal over 153,000 ETH from several projects including Edgeless Casino, Aeternity, and Swarm City.

A swift response from a whitehat hacker group used the same exploit to drain many other project’s parity multisig wallets, in order to protect them from theft. This group was able to save over 377,000 ETH. Unfortunately the 44,055 ETH that was in Swarm City’s wallet is gone.

CNBC notes that ether’s price dropped from roughly $235 to about $196 after the theft was reported, according to data from Coindesk. It had climbed back up to $217 on Friday.

Hackers were able to steal the ethereum coins by exploiting a vulnerability in the multisignature code of a digital wallet called Parity, according to CNBC.

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