Stolen Altcoins in Augur & Ethereum Hack Investigation

An account belonging to Bo Shen, one of the early investors in Ethereum and Augur, was reportedly hacked on Tuesday causing funds from both networks to be drained.

The hacked wallet was a top 20 wallet by size in Augur and constituted a significant percent of the total token supply. It was big enough to fill practically all the orders in the Poloniex buy side order book.

The Poloniex Augur market has bottomed at the price level of 0.0001 BTC for one REP despite the average price of 0.0035 in the previous period.

Poloniex tweeted that they have been investigating the Augur matter but have been limited in what they could find because the trades in question were executed via an instant exchange service.

Following Shen’s money

Shen has been a strong supporter of Blockchain technology and one of the organizers of Shanghai’s Global Blockchain Summit. He is a co-founder of Chinese VC firm Febushi, the first China-based venture capital firm that exclusively invests in Blockchain-enabled companies.

The hacking of Shen’s account has been suggested to be a hijack by social engineers.  The kind of hackers who heavily rely on human interaction and trick people into breaking normal security procedures. Kraken reports that there have been more cases of cryptocurrency scene actors being victimized by mobile phone hijacking.

As earlier noted by Augur co-founder Jack Peterson, Shen’s REP and ETH were reportedly dumped on the Poloniex exchange on the said day causing the price of ETH to tank to as low as $5.98, as the dollar value of Augur’s digital asset Reputation (REP) also dropped to $2.09 – though they have both recovered according to CoinMarketCap.

Huge transaction discovered

Cointelegraph has analyzed the contents of the blocks around the time when the money was stolen from Bo Shen’s account and tried to track the transaction. During that period there was only one such transaction:

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x5fb679e22336a634609fd4208df05e9e212f3d54d8ce73ff5ff40af75bbba937

It can be seen here: 110,000.1446470998 REP. This is one of the biggest transactions since ICO – Augur network has an average of 20 transactions per hour.

The account belongs to one of the original investors –  this is evidenced by the fact that the money had been there since the time of ICO.

The first funds were received from Token Holder Address: 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000, 119,000 REP in total. It is without any doubt that this is the culprit. It is also possible to see that not so long ago a transaction of 110,000 REP had been carried out – supposedly to the hacker’s account.

Let’s start tracking now.

Here’s the hacker’s wallet: https://etherscan.io/token/REP?a=0xb08241488b1b3a4eafdb125c218cec7d086cfaa7

Out of that wallet, the funds were transferred in smaller amounts to various addresses.

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