$1.46 billion stolen in largest crypto hack on Bybit exchange
Ethereum (ETH) took a nosedive by 3.6% in the past few hours as Bybit, the second-biggest exchange in the world, just confirmed that they've been hacked.
ZachXBT, a big name in blockchain investigation, was one of the first to say something about it. He noticed some weird money moving out of one of Bybit's cold wallets on Telegram.
Just a few hours ago, Bybit's co-founder and CEO, Ben Zhou, said that one of their Ethereum cold wallets was totally messed up. The bad guys got their hands on 401,346 ETH tokens, which are worth about $1.46 billion right now.
Bybit ETH multisig cold wallet just made a transfer to our warm wallet about 1 hr ago. It appears that this specific transaction was musked, all the signers saw the musked UI which showed the correct address and the URL was from @safe . However the signing message was to change…
— Ben Zhou (@benbybit) February 21, 2025
Zhou said that no other wallets were affected. The hackers got into the wallet by messing with a transaction request sent to the signatory wallets. Once it was approved, they changed the smart contract's rules and moved the money to their own address.
If the official exchange sources say this is the real deal, it would be the biggest heist ever involving a centralised exchange. And to make things even harder to track down, the hacker has spread the money across a bunch of different wallets.
Zhou said that Bybit has the money to cover this loss and that your account balance won't change. He also said that all withdrawals are working fine.
It is estimated by people at BitMEX Research that up to 75% of the ETH that Bybit users had might be gone for good.
