The hacker behind the $321 million Wormhole bridge assault has shifted a big chunk of stolen funds, with transaction knowledge displaying that $155 million price of Ether (ETH) was transferred to a decentralized change (DEX) on Jan 23.
The Wormhole hack was the third largest crypto hack in 2022, after the protocol’s token bridge suffered an exploit on Feb. 2, 2022, that resulted within the lack of 120,000 Wrapped ETH (wETH) round price $321 million.
In line with the transaction historical past of the hacker’s alleged pockets handle, the newest exercise reveals that 95,630 ETH was despatched to the OpenOcean DEX after which subsequently transformed into ETH-pegged property reminiscent of Lido Finance’s staked ETH (stETH) and wrapped staked (wstETH).
We’re seeing handle 0x629e… Wormhole Community Exploiter swap 95,630 Ether (~$155M) to stETH
Keep secure! pic.twitter.com/ZR6zxlRuKX
— CertiK Alert (@CertiKAlert) January 23, 2023
Digging into the transaction historical past additional, crypto group members reminiscent of @spreekaway additionally highlighted that the hacker went on to conduct a slew of strange trying transactions.
For instance, the hacker used their stETH holdings as collateral to borrow 13 million price of the DAI stablecoin, earlier than swapping it out for extra stETH, wrapping into stETH once more after which borrowing some extra DAI.
Wormhole exploiter has transformed his ETH to wstETH and goes to borrow DAI in opposition to it it appears. pic.twitter.com/9rhERSMG5u
— Spreek (@spreekaway) January 23, 2023
Notably, the Wormhole crew has taken the chance to as soon as once more supply the hacker a bounty of $10 million in the event that they return all of the funds, after it left an embedded message conveying such in a transaction through the Wormhole: Deployer.

The hacker’s hefty ETH transaction seems to have had a direct influence on the worth of stETH in accordance with knowledge from Dune Analytics. The asset’s worth went from slightly below peg of 0.9962 ETH on Jan. 23, to as excessive as 1.0002 ETH the next day, earlier than dropping again to 0.9981 on the time of writing.
Associated: North Korea’s Lazarus Group masterminded $100M Concord hack: FBI confirms
With the Wormhole hack prone to catch extra consideration in gentle of the newest incident, blockchain safety corporations reminiscent of Ancilia, Inc. warned on Jan. 19 that looking the key phrases “Wormhole Bridge” in Google is at the moment displaying promoted advert web sites which can be really phishing operations.
The group has been warned to be diligent on what they’re clicking on referring to this time period.
#phishing alert If you search “wormhole bridge” in Google, lots of the “advert” entries are literally phishing website. E.g.
hxxps://wormholebridge-multichain.com/
hxxps://portaltoken-wormholebridge.com. Watch out about what you click on and keep secure! pic.twitter.com/C6JW2xeaUh— Ancilia, Inc. (@AnciliaInc) January 19, 2023