This week, the crypto community on Twitter was in an uproar when there was information about a series of crypto wallets that had been suspiciously extracted.
This information was shared by the Twitter account “Tay” (a member of the MetaMask wallet builder), “In the past 48 hours, I have witnessed a lot of crypto wallets being drained. I don't know how serious this is, but since December 2022, 5,000 ETH has been stolen, including tokens, NFTs, and foundation coins on over 11 different blockchains. Right now, no one knows what the reason is.”
This account shares further. There is no sign of being related to phishing sites. And the worrying thing is that the hacked addresses are all OGs (old wallets) instead of newly created wallets and just joined the market.
In addition, some common features of these hacked accounts include:
The key is generated from 2014-2022.
There is a lot of activity in the crypto market, owning many accounts.
Tay said: “My guess right now, it may be because some people have stored a large amount of cache data from a year ago, from which they can find the key - the key of the wallets. But this is just a guess, I don't know. This is not a cryptographic story. Don't waste your time”.
Hackers are often active from 10 am to 4 pm (UTC time). And then there will be a dusting activity between 4 pm and 10 pm (UTC). With a large number of tokens, the hacker will actively swap to ETH right in the victim's wallet, and then perform the extraction operation.
It is worth noting that staking positions, NFTs, and less famous tokens will not be scanned by hackers, since then they have not been extracted.
Currently, there is no detailed information on the cause and method of the attack. Therefore, the step recommended by the Tay account to users is to distribute assets scattered to avoid unwanted risks.