Behind The Scenes of The Biggest Address Poisoning Incident in History
By Michael Pearl, VP GTM Strategy at Cyvers.ai
Uncovering the jaw-dropping story behind the $68M+ address poisoning heist that shook the crypto world. How did they pull it off?
It was just another day in the security operations center at Cyvers.ai Until the alarms started blaring.
"We've got a huge one," senior blockchain scientist Hakan Unal said, "Someone just got completely drained."
$68 million drained in an address poisoning attack? That had to be some sort of error.
He validated the alert multiple times, checking and re-checking the blockchain data. The proof was indisputable: Someone had robbed $68M from a single miscopied address.
He said, "I've never seen an address poisoning attack anywhere near this scale before," sounding shell-shocked. "We had to review the data several times to ensure it was real."
But this wasn't the first time Cyvers' advanced detection systems caught such an attack.
Following full verification, The Cyvers Alerts team got into action - alerted the community, and started tracking down the culprit. This was an exceptional case due to the massive volume drained.
So what exactly went down?
The victim was trying to send over 1,155 WBTC to a wallet address they'd used before, A routine transaction. let's call it TrustWallet.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
But they didn't know it, a bad hacker was setting a trap for them. They looked through blockchain data until they found TrustWallet's address and then made an EvilWallet address that was almost the same.
We're talking about a few single differing characters out of dozens.
victim:
0x1E227979f0b5BC691a70DEAed2e0F39a6F538FD5
EvilWallet:
0xd9A1C3788D81257612E2581A6ea0aDa244853a91
TrustWallet:
0xd9A1b0B1e1aE382DbDc898Ea68012FfcB2853a91
Poison txn:
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Using clever tactics, the hacker blasted the victim's wallet with a "dummy" transaction from EvilWallet, poisoning their history.
So when the victim went to quickly copy-paste TrustWallet's address as they'd done before, they fatally grabbed the poisoned version instead.
It was already too late when they realized their $68 million was missing.
For a while, the hacker ghosted all attempts at negotiation. The victim even offered a 10% bounty to get their funds back, to no avail.
Until a few days ago, when the mysterious attacker's message landed like a blockchain bombshell:
"I want to get in touch with the victim. Send me their Telegram."
Record scratch 👀 Wait, WHAT?
After some back-and-forth, an agreement was struck. While the details are still murky, the hacker ultimately sent back a whopping $66.8M worth of ETH to the victim.
"It's unheard of for attackers to return funds like this," says Hakan. "Either they had a major change of heart, or there's more to this story."
One thing's for sure - address poisoning is one of the lowest-tech but highest-risk attack vectors out there. A single miscopied character is all it takes to get rugged.
So learn from this victim's $68M nightmare:
✅ Always double-check every single character of any address.
✅ Never trust a wallet's TX history, store important addresses elsewhere.
✅ For huge transactions, do test sends first.
As Hakan puts it: "Crypto security isn't a game. One tiny lapse in concentration and you could be the next victim we're staying late trying to remediate."
You've been warned. Stay safe out there!
Consider getting Cyvers to watch your back - our blockchain security monitoring could be the difference between keeping or losing your life's savings.
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