Is Certik robbing Kraken for millions of dollars? What’s going on?

Blockchain security company CertiK stepped forward As the mastermind behind what cryptocurrency exchange Kraken accused of a “whitehat hack” on Wednesday.coercion.”

Kraken CSO Nick Percoco said the exchange suffered losses of nearly $3 million.criminal case“A group of tech-savvy researchers”isolated bug.”

CertiK is Kraken be threatened Company employees. CertiK also claimed that the total value of the funds Kraken was demanding back was “mismatched” compared to the cryptocurrency it had taken.

CertiK also claimed there was too little time to return the stolen funds.

According to Percoco, previously unnamed researchers were able to steal millions of dollars in cryptocurrency from Kraken by withdrawing funds credited to their accounts before the deposits were completed. Attackers “can effectively print assets,” he said. wrote.

CertiK said it exploited this bug several times as part of its investigation while assessing the scope of Kraken’s security vulnerabilities. Although the exchange reportedly failed to provide an address for returning the funds, CertiK said records show it was sending the cryptocurrency to a digital wallet that Kraken had access to.

White hacker hacking is often described as an ethical form of technological tampering performed with the purpose of identifying vulnerabilities within a particular system. However, the bug bounty submitted in connection with the exploit revealed only $4 in Percoco, the stolen cryptocurrency. wrote.

In addition, Percoco assert Malicious attackers will not agree to return funds until they are provided with an estimate of the potential cost of the exploit.

“Millions of dollars of cryptocurrency were minted out of thin air and no real Kraken users’ assets were directly involved in our research activities,” CertiK defended, echoing Percoco’s assurance that the funds were merely lost from Kraken’s vaults. . .

Taylor Monahan — former CEO and founder of MyCrypto, an Ethereum wallet manager acquired by Consensys in 2022 and converted to MetaMask —wrote On Twitter, CertiK said it should fear what Kraken’s lawyers, reputational damage and turmoil could do to CertiK’s internal culture.

She also said that several cryptocurrency projects have been audited by CertiK. Victimized by past abusesNew speculation about a possible former insider job was spreading online.

“The real question is why Kraken’s defense-in-depth systems failed to detect so many test transactions,” CertiK said in its response to Monahan. “This is actually what we tested.”

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.