Tether CEO: Hacker attempts payment exploit using $15 billion worth of XRP!

Jafar224

In the early morning of January 15th, Whale Alert, an account specialized in tracking large on-chain transactions, posted that an unidentified wallet had sent 25.6 billion XRP (worth nearly 15 billion USD) to the Bitfinex exchange. The transfer of such a massive amount, equivalent to almost half of the current circulating supply of XRP (54.2 billion), sparked considerable discussion.

However, shortly after the announcement, Whale Alert deleted the post, citing issues with correctly interpreting Ripple nodes, which led to the dissemination of incorrect information. Bitfinex's CTO responded to this, and Paolo Ardoino, the newly appointed CEO of Tether and Bitfinex's CTO, addressed the situation by stating that someone attempted to exploit Bitfinex through the "Partial Payments Exploit." The potential attackers anticipated that the exchange had incorrectly configured its software to handle partial payments.

It's worth noting that the Partial Payments Exploit works on the assumption that the exchange's system is incorrectly configured to only read the amount field of XRP transactions. In reality, the attacker sends an amount much smaller, specified in another transaction field, and gains the difference.

Ardoino clarified that the attack failed because Bitfinex correctly processed the 'delivered_amount' data field. Additionally, according to blockchain data, the attacker also attempted to transfer hundreds of millions of XRP to Binance for an attack, but this attempt was also unsuccessful.

Isha000

I'm very happy that almost every company now has USDT.

Ritu13

I need to learn more about what happened.