A resident of the Indian state of Karnataka, Srikrishna Ramesh (Srikrishna Ramesh) told police of his involvement in breaches of cryptocurrency exchanges Bitfinex and BTC-e, as well as the BitClub Network fraudulent mining pool. India Today.
Ramesh was arrested in November 2020 in connection with a drug-trafficking case. Subsequently, he admitted to numerous cybercrimes, including those related to cryptocurrency services.
According to him, he is behind the Bitfinex hack that occurred in May 2015. The platform was attacked again in August 2016, but the Indian hacker allegedly had no involvement in that incident.
“Bitfinex was the first major cryptocurrency exchange I hacked. The platform was hacked twice, and I was the first to do it. The second case was merely a targeted phishing attack, as a result of which two Israeli hackers working for the army gained access to the computers of one of the employees, and then to the AWS account,” Ramesh said.
He said that a bug in Bitfinex’s data centre allowed access to the KVM on the server. As a result, the latter was rebooted in GRUB mode — Ramesh reset the administrator password, logged into the system, reset the withdrawal server passwords and sent cryptocurrency to his own address.
The hacker said that the attack earned him about 20,008 BTC, which he spent to sustain a luxurious lifestyle.
Ramesh also claimed responsibility for hacking the servers of the fraudulent mining pool BitClub Network, from which he withdrew about 100 BTC, and the now-defunct Bitcoin exchange BTC-e. According to him, the most recent attack yielded a “large profit” of $3–$3.25 million.
In August 2021, the hacker breached the hot wallets of the Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Liquid and withdrew digital assets worth more than $80 million.