- Operator presumed to be arrested in Israel.
- The authorities plan to extradite it in the United States.
- He faces accusations of money laundering and computer -related offenses.
Last week, Israeli police arrested a pirate suspected of having been involved in the feat that drained $ 190 million in Nomad cryptocurrency, which led to the collapse of the Crypto Bridge protocol.
Depending on the reports of THE Jerusalem PostAlexander Gurevich, the suspected hacker, was caught at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. Gurevich, a double Russian-Israeli citizen, tried to go to Russia using documents bearing a different name at the time of his arrest.
“It corresponds to the profile of a cryptocurrency threat actor: skillful to the exploitation of intelligent contracts but ultimately defeated by the poor Opecc,” said Peter Kacherginsky, a blockchain security expert and formerly of the 0x security team 0x of Coinbase, in reaction to the arrest of Gurevich.
The Israeli authorities are now organizing Gurevich extradition to the United States, where it faces money laundering and computer-related offenses.
The report indicates that American prosecutors accused Gurevich of being the first to exploit the weakness of Nomad smart contracts, leading to the feat of $ 190 million, which was mainly in the stablecoin USDC and wrapped in Bitcoin and Ethereum versions.
This allegation is based on the alleged admission of Gurevich to the Nomad team in a series of telegram messages. He even supposed to have asked for a bonus of $ 500,000 for identifying the vulnerability that allowed an attacker to train him intelligent nomad contracts with non -valid transactions to withdraw funds from the protocol.
It is not uncommon for crypto exploiters to require a percentage of their booty as an affected protocol bonus. The agreement is generally the one which implies a return of the rest of the funds exploited in exchange for the presence of any action in application of the law against the attacker.
Most pirates have ignored these arrangements, with the exception of a few notable exceptions. Last May, a pirate who stole $ 72 million in a Bitcoin whale negotiated to keep 10% of syphonized funds while returning the rest.
American prosecutors accused Gurevich of syphonated $ 2.89 million in Nomad cryptocurrency in August 2022.
But Nomad lost $ 190 million in attack. So who is responsible for the rest of the attack?
The answer, a host of copies that joined the frenzy once the feat has been detected, transforming the breach of a pirate into a free deffi for all.
“This is why the hack was so chaotic – you did not need to know the solidity or the trees of Merkle or something like that,” said Samczsun, an eminent pseudonym researcher of the blockchain, at the time of the feat. All you had to do was find a transaction that worked, to find / replace the address of the other person by yours, then to re-bride. “”
ONCHAIN’s data from the feat brought back by Coinbase revealed 88 unique wallet addresses identified as copies, and they were responsible for the abolition of $ 88 million from the bridge. Other participants in the free feat for all used different gurevich methods, but finally exploited the same vulnerability to extract nomad funds.
Some participants finally turned out to be Whitehats, supposedly ethical hackers, who act to alleviate bad actors or blackhats. These Whitehats returned the funds they withdrew from Nomad during the attack.
Osato Avan-Nomayo is our DEFI correspondent based in Nigeria. It covers Defi and Tech. Do you have a tip? Please contact him at Osato@dlnews.com
