Hacker Demanded 4,500 ETH ransom from Nexus Mutual founder

The attacker who hacked the personal wallet of Nexus Mutual founder Hugh Karp demanded 4500 ETH (~$2.6 million at the time of writing). The hacker’s comment was left via a transaction.

He stated that he would not sell the NXM tokens until the price recovers or until Karp transfers the ransom. The hacker added three addresses to the message, where more than $10 million is stored.

“You’re rich, Hugh,” wrote the unidentified individual.

Screenshot of the transaction from the service Etherscan.

Karp responded to the attacker’s demand on Twitter, saying that one of the addresses belonged to the Nexus Foundation, and that he does not have that much cryptocurrency.

0xFC6.. is the Nexus Foundation address, it’s not mine.

I don’t have that much ETH https://t.co/4isS3aKBd9

— Hugh Karp 🐢 (@HughKarp) December 16, 2020

The Nexus Mutual team said it identified a user in Singapore who recently completed a KYC procedure and interacted with the attacker’s wallet.

Now the funny part is that 0x832 has a real KYC. Singapore resident, with Singaporean phone number, a real email address that dates back many years ago, and Singaporean residential IP address. pic.twitter.com/6aPUrJxusQ

— Nexus Mutual 🐢 (@NexusMutual) December 15, 2020

Earlier installed on Hugh Karp’s personal computer a compromised version of the MetaMask app that tricked him into confirming the transaction.

The attacker’s loot amounted to 370,000 NXM (about $8.22 million at the time of writing). According to Nexus Mutual, the protocol itself and users’ funds were not affected.

On December 14, the WNXM token price fell from $19.15 to $16.57. At the time of writing, the coin was trading at $16.18.

Data: CoinGecko.

The attacker estimated that such an amount of NXM would be hard to cash out. He offered the attacker a $300,000 reward, calling the hack “a very good trick.”

to move 137 BTC to two addresses, the hacker used the renBTC tokenized-BTC protocol.

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