This article was published on June 7, 2019

Hackers reportedly stole nearly $10M worth of Ripple (XRP) in GateHub hack

Ripples of tears


Hackers reportedly stole nearly $10M worth of Ripple (XRP) in GateHub hack

Another day, another cryptocurrency heist. Hackers have breached over 100 Ripple (XRP) Ledger wallets managed by service provider GateHub. If that wasn’t bad enough, additional reports suggest the attackers have siphoned off more than $10 million worth of XRP.

“Recently, we have been notified by our customers and community members about funds on their XRP Ledger wallets being stolen and immediately started monitoring network activity, and conducted an extensive internal investigation,” wrote GateHub chief Enej Pungercar. Unfortunately, the company has yet to identify what caused the issue.

GateHub say it’s in the process of reviewing the suspicious activity, but no official conclusions have been posted at the time of writing.

At the moment we estimate that approximately 100 XRP Ledger wallets were compromised,” Pungercar added. “So far it looks like all the victims had their XRP Ledger wallets hosted on GateHub, but we cannot yet rule out that some wallets were not.”

XRP enthusiast Thomas Silkjær, who first noticed the suspicious activity, estimates that the hackers have thieved nearly $10 million worth of cryptocurrency (23,200,000XRP), $5.5 million (13,100,000XRP) of which  has “already been laundered through exchanges and mixer services.”

Among other services, the attackers relied on Binance, Changelly, KuCoin, Huobi, and HitBTC to convert the funds.

Credit: Thomas Silkjær

In the meantime, GateHub says it has emailed all users possibly affected by the theft with instructions how to protect their funds. “If you have not received an email from us, then we have no reason to believe your account was compromised,” the company added.

Get the TNW newsletter

Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.

Also tagged with