A Bengali man was recently taken into police custody, allegedly in connection with the massive $235 million WazirX crypto hack reported earlier this year.
Delhi authorities (in India) apparently made a significant breakthrough in the WazirX hacking incident, by arresting a suspect residing in West Bengal.
In a significant development in the lengthy investigation of a $235 million hack of the WazirX exchange, Delhi authorities apprehended an individual from the Bengal region. The man is suspected of being involved in the $235 million crypto heist.
As widely reported, the security breach was not due to any kind of “internal” system issues as it had allegedly been carried out via a fake account that was reportedly sold through Telegram to another entity which then proceeded to exploit it.
WazirX has reportedly been fairly cooperative and has supplied hardware, as well as KYC records along with transaction details needed for the probe. But the exchange has been heavily criticized by its users who have lost large amounts of funds. With WazirX suspending withdrawals, users are extremely frustrated with how the exchange’s management is handling the situation.
During the past few months, there had been suggestions to “socialize” the losses by asking users to help with dealing with the situation. WazirX has also been accused of simply acting in its own interests rather than serve the needs of customers. Meanwhile, Indian crypto exchange CoinDCX has also been critical of WazirX’s operations but has used the opportunity to attract customers to its exchange instead of trying to play a supportive role in addressing the concerns of impacted consumers.
The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (IFSO) has stated that WazirX’s internal systems were not actually compromised, providing validation of the exchange’s security protocols, which have been scrutinized by its clients during the past few months.
According to reports, WazirX’s systems were apparently targeted via an external access point obtained through malicious practices.
It’s also being reported that the hackers accessed WazirX’s multi-sig wallet, and then drained it of valuable digital tokens worth about $235 million at the time of the incident (but are worth a lot more now due to the increase in crypto prices).
As noted in a charge-sheet, it has been suspected that the Bengali individual was part of an organized group of bad actors who had breached the exchange’s platform by a opening up a fake account.
The individual in question reportedly revealed that a buyer of the crypto account through Telegram provided him a substantial amount for Wazir X crypto accounts.
It’s worthwhile to note that an independent review of the incident by the IFSO confirmed that WazirX’s systems had not actually be compromised.
However, the probe has seen issues arising with various third-party service providers tasked with managing the cryptocurrency exchange’s assets, suggesting that slow cooperation had affected data collection.
Liminal Custody, which had been serving as WazirX’s custody partner, issued an update that noted that reports were allegedly part of the crypto exchange platform’s so-called “disinformation” agenda.
This apparently referred to WazirX trying to put the blame for the incident on Liminal by releasing “misleading” details via data disclosures as well as claims that Liminal had not acted in a responsible manner.
Liminal has stated that the Indian exchange maintained more than $175 million in crypto on its platform 75 days following the incident while alleging that the custody provider was to blame for the damaging security breach.
