The VeChain Foundation announced in the hours leading up to press time that its buyback address was compromised, leading to the loss of approximately 1.1 billion VET tokens (appr. $6,380,000)
The latest development comes as a shock to one of the cryptocurrency projects that has shown a lot of promise even though the foundation reported that efforts are already underway to reclaim the stolen token.
Among other measures, the VeChain Foundation said it has tagged the hacker’s main address and other associated addressing using monitoring tool VeChain Stats.
Such real-time tracking understandably allows the team to get updates as the funds move on its way to exchanges where the hackers may attempt to convert them to other cryptocurrencies or fiat.
Additionally, the VeChain Foundation noted in the announcement that it has contacted all crypto exchanges “to monitor, blacklist and freeze any funds coming from the hacker address and any withdraws from the corresponding exchanging wallets.”
Attention is also being paid to the few exchanges where the hacker had sent funds to in the past, with the team also reporting that it is conducting internal investigations to “determine the motive, method, and data flow behind this malicious act.”
Commenting on the most likely scenario that led to the security breach, a section of the announcement read:
[It] was most likely due to misconduct of one of the team members within our finance team, who have created the buyback account without thoroughly obeying The Standard Procedure approved by the Foundation, and our auditing team did not pick up this misconduct, due to human error.
The Foundation reiterate that the breach was not in any way associated with “the effectiveness of the actual Standard Procedure or VeChain’s hardware wallet solutions.” Cybersecurity experts around the globe are also said to be closely monitoring the situation and seeking to retrieve the funds.
VET Sees Mild 5% Drop Despite VeChain Hack
Under adverse circumstances, one would expect the VeChain hack to lead to a massive downtrend in the price of VeChain tokens (VET).
At the time of writing, however, the cryptocurrency was exchanging hands at $0.005788 per coin while recording a mild 5% loss within the last 24 hours with a market cap still above $320 million.
