Cryptopia

Private Key Leakage

Estimated loss

—

VERDICT —OUT OF SCOPE

Root cause is private-key / signer compromise — the on-chain contract behaved exactly as written. No pre-deployment source audit or bytecode review reaches the key-custody perimeter; this is operational-security territory (HSM/MPC hygiene, key rotation, hot-wallet isolation). Bytecode would show nothing wrong.

▰ METHOD

PRIVATE KEY

PRIVATE-KEY

Root cause

Root-cause analysis not yet published. The incident description below contains all currently available signal — review the attack transaction directly for definitive forensics.

Forensic narrative

A former employee of the now-defunct Cryptopia exchange allegedly stole more than 250,000 New Zealand dollars (US$182,300) of cryptocurrency and customer data from Cryptopia. However, the New Zealand authorities managed to recover the stolen funds and return them to Cryptopia's liquidator Grant Thornton. The man explained in detail how he stole the funds. He said that he unauthorizedly copied the private keys belonging to Cryptopia's many wallets and saved the data on a USB storage device. Then he uploaded the data to his personal computer at home. This allows him to use thousands of wallets and more than 100 million U.S. dollars in various cryptocurrencies. Attack method (per SlowMist): Private Key Leakage. Reported loss: -.

Primary source

https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/110495/ex-employee-pleads-guilty-to-stealing-over-170000-from-cryptopia ↗

Sourced from

slowmist

Technical record