QUADRIGA INITIATIVE
CRYPTO WATCHDOG & FRAUD RECOVERY PLATFORM
A COMMUNITY-BASED, NOT-FOR-PROFIT
$2 500 000 USD
OCTOBER 2020
GLOBAL
ETHERCRASH
DESCRIPTION OF EVENTS
"EtherCrash is the most established and largest gambling game for Ethereum. Based on Bustabit and provably fair with a low house edge."
"EtherCrash's outcome can be proven as fair. There are third party scripts you can use to verify the game hashes and calculate the results." "Every game starts from 0x and counts up, you can watch your wager amount being multiplied in your bet area and choose to cash out at anytime but beware if you wait too long it can crash and you will lose your entire bet."
"Increase your Ethereum holdings by investing into the bankroll of Ethercrash. By being part of the growing bankroll you can monitor your investment and see its growth or decline whenever you choose. By investing you ensure we can also have a higher max bet limit. The bankroll is used for paying out players who want to withdraw their winnings. Invest into Ethercrash today and see your money grow!"
"On October 26, 2020 Ethercrash cold wallet was compromised with 6378 ETH stolen." "Recently, AlonGal, the chief technology officer of the cybercrime intelligence company HudsonRock, tweeted that on October 27, the EtherCrash cold wallet that claimed to be "the most mature and largest gambling game in Ethereum" was stolen, with a loss of about 2.5 million U.S. dollars." "A cold wallet is one that has never been connected to the Internet. Alon Gal, chief technology officer of cyber crime intelligence company Hudson Rock, posted the notice on Twitter."
"The stolen funds were exchanged to DAI on Uniswap." "The company said in a notice [graphic below] on the proprietary freeware instant messaging and VoIP application and digital distribution platform Discord that its cold wallet had been compromised and two large withdrawals made." "EtherCrash provided the addresses to which the transfers were made and said it had changed its sweeping address."
"Asked whether there had been other thefts from EtherCrash, Gal told iTWire that he had been referring to other hacks at other companies in his tweet which read: "Another hack of around $2,500,000 happened today on EtherCrash." "He said he was referring to the attack at decentralised finance player Harvest Finance (see tweet below) which lost about US$24 million last week."
"It is reported that EtherCrash has issued a notice on Discord in which it mentioned that the EtherCrash cold wallet was stolen and there were two large withdrawals. EtherCrash stated that it will compensate users for their property losses, but it will take some time because the losses are more serious."
"Our initial plan on repaying the investors of EtherCrash is not to take any commission and have these funds pay back the investors directly," the notice said, adding, "however this may take some time." The company said it was open to ideas "on how we can make things right".
EtherCrash is an online gambling website which supposedly had funds stolen from a cold wallet. Details could not be located regarding the exact nature of the breach, and it appears that the company has no means to repay the funds of investors.
No further tweets were found on Twitter after October 3rd, 2020, while the website appears to remain online.
HOW COULD THIS HAVE BEEN PREVENTED?
Having a wallet managed through a single key held by a single individual leaves a system vulnerable to any mistakes that individual may make. It is significantly more secure to have the funds in a proper multi-signature wallet, where multiple parties must be breached or participate for funds to go missing.
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