In December 2022, Alexander Ivanov received a message from hackers claiming that they had been accessing information in the Waves system for six months.
The unknown assailants demanded a ransom, but the businessman refused to pay the ransom. He did not disclose the size of the financial loss or give details of the break-in.
“It was a pretty bad situation.. We could have had a much bigger financial loss,” Ivanov says.
When asked why he didn’t report the hack to the Waves community after it became known in December, the founder of the project dodged the question.
“We’ve had similar situations before,” Ivanov said, but did not specify what he meant by “similar situations.”
Alexander Ivanov suggested that the hackers were trying to cash out stolen funds through a centralized exchange, but declined to say which one.
Waves is a Tier 1 blockchain, launched in 2016, designed to issue crypto-assets and conduct crowdfunding campaigns. In April 2022, Waves’ capitalization reached $5.6 billion.
Earlier, experts from Kaspersky Lab described an incident in which attackers were able to tamper with a hardware cryptocurrency wallet and steal $30,000 worth of bitcoins.
In May, it was publicized that hackers managed to steal more than $15 million in various cryptocurrencies using a website that mimicked the HitBTC cryptocurrency exchange page.