Bitfinex Hack: New Twist Shows More Details On The Stolen $1.5M

As the latest cryptocurrency news showed last week, the Bitfinex hack has been one of the most prominent crypto cyber crimes  in recent years. It took a dramatic turn on June 23, when two Israeli brothers were jailed in connection with the 2016 Bitfinex hack as well as other phishing attacks.

To remind you again, there were around 120,000 Bitcoin (BTC) stolen in the attack back in 2016 – an amount that is initially worth $72 million. However, after Bitcoin’s meteoric rise in the summer of 2019, the value of the stolen funds now amounts to around $1.4 billion.

An Israeli spokesperson recently spoke to Finance Magnates and said that Eli and Assaf Gigi managed to steal tens of millions of dollars from their activities. There was a police raid along with the Bitfinex hack and the arrests also located a crypto wallet containing a much smaller sum than the Israeli brothers allegedly stole.

The spokesperson was also featured in the altcoin news for stating that the duo lured in their victims by creating clone versions of major online crypto exchanges and wallet providers. They also shared links to them through both Telegram groups and other crypto-related communities. The Israeli brothers now stand accused because of the Bitfinex hack, which also involved identity theft and compromising of several users’ accounts.

This is the second time the Bitfinex hack is in the headlines of many best cryptocurrency news sites. On June 7, we reported that $1.5 million of the funds stolen in the hack were moved from the hackers’ personal wallets to an unknown address. The Whale Alert Twitter profile also confirmed this.

One of the most shocking things regarding the arrest was the announcement that one of the brother (the older one) had received specialist training from an elite technological unit of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Cybersecurity experts believe that the Bitfinex hack was carried out with a more rudimentary level of education and some self-taught skills.

“You don’t need ‘military training’ to conduct cybercrime on today’s centralized exchanges. Most recently we have seen hackers gain access to databases holding users’ access tokens and steal their funds. Even as AT&T is being sued for $240 million dollars by Michael Terpin, we continue to see a very large number of sim jackings via social engineering methods. From sim-swapping, phishing, key-logger attacks, crypto jacking, there’s an array of low hanging fruit for hackers currently to go after,” the co-founder of a cybersecurity agency said.

Another researcher and cybersecurity expert named Igor Kotsiuba also shared his views on the Bitfinex hack and said:

“The most prevalent attacks in the crypto world today are DDoS and phishing. Capabilities for man-in-the-middle or DDoS can be obtained in school, after classes with friends, so elite military school is more than enough for that.”

As the coming altcoin news show, hacks are common in the crypto world, but their activities are definitely something difficult to deal with.