The DeFi protocol was hacked on Thursday, with the attacker allegedly stealing $ 16 million
Indexed Finance, a decentralized financial protocol (DeFi) that allows token holders to track market indices, has reportedly exposed the hacker behind last week’s attack.
On Thursday, the DeFi protocol announced that it was affected by a Flash Loan attack in which the attacker captured $ 16 million. After flooding the protocol with new assets and affecting prices, the hacker allegedly minted new tokens worth millions.
In a Updatepublished after the attack, the Indexed team said that the hack “pretty devastating” and the indices DEFI5 and CC10 were affected. In the post-mortem report, the address used to steal the funds was specified as 0xba5ed1488be60ba2facc6b66c6d6f0befba22ebe.
Attackers unmasked
In the hours after the attack, Indexed Finance asked the hacker to keep 10% of the money and return the rest. But after that offer expired and an ultimatum to return 100% of the stolen funds expired, the team announced that it had found links that identified the hacker.
“We identified the indexed attacker and found links to exchanges. We have an ultimatum.”, sagte Laurence Day, member of IndexedDAO, on Saturday.
The team further informed that the investigations of the attack have yieldedthat the attacker, although initially overlooked, used accounts at the FTX and Kraken crypto exchanges to fund his wallet. Both exchanges require their users to verify customer identity, which Indexed Finance was able to verify to expose the face behind the $16 million heist.
“In the minutes before the deadline, @zetazeroes made changes to his accounts that made us realize at the last minute that the attacker is considerably younger than we thought”, as stated in the protocol.
While the identity of the hacker has been established, Indexed Finance has deferred the release of further details as it discusses internally how best to proceed given the age of the hacker.
It is not clear what Indexed Finance intends to do, nor whether they will seek help from law enforcement agencies.
In the market, the NDX token continues to be under downward pressure, having slumped 7% in the past 24 hours. At the time of writing, the token was trading at a price of $2.94 against the US dollar.