- The attacker tried to hack the Bitfinex and Binance exchanges using a “partial payments” exploit.
- He conducted a “fake” transaction for $15 billion in XRP tokens.
- The hack failed because Bitfinex processed the data correctly.
- This information was confirmed by the CTO of the platform, Paolo Ardoino.
On January 14, 2024, Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino announced a hacker attack on the exchange. The attacker tried to gain access to funds using the “partial payments” vulnerability.
According to Ardoino, the hacking attempt was unsuccessful, and user funds are safe:
ðŸ› ï¸ There was an issue with properly reading the #Ripple node response, resulting in a few wrong posts. We fixed the issue.
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) January 14, 2024
Ardoino explained that the supposed transaction worth about $15 billion in XRP tokens turned out to be fake. An unknown person attempted to falsify the deposit and actually sent a much smaller amount, marking it as a partial payment.
Information about the large XRP transfer first appeared on the Whale Alert page on X (formerly Twitter). Analysts reported a large transfer of 25.6 billion XRP, representing almost half of the coins in circulation.
The message was later deleted. Whale Alert reported “an issue with Ripple data being misread, resulting in incorrect information being published.”
According to Bithomp, the attacker tried to attack another cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, using a fake transfer of 58.9 billion XRP, but the exploit attempt also failed.
Dmitriy YurchenkoLet us recall that in 2019, a user of the BitoPro exchange withdrew about 7 million XRP using the “partial payments” vulnerability.. The mechanism of how the exploit works was explained in detail by the Bitrue platform team:
In September 2023, the CoinEx cryptocurrency exchange was hacked for $53 million. We also reported that unknown persons withdrew more than $6 million in XRP from the Coins.ph platform.