In a surprising incident, the US authorities arrested a person and accused him of hacking right into a crypto trade and stealing cryptocurrency price $9 million. The fraud seemingly began as an moral hack of types by the engineer after which he went rogue. As per the indictment, the accused, Shakeeb Ahmed, used his experience within the area to defraud the trade and its customers and stole the huge sum. Whereas the report mentions Ahmed is a senior safety engineer for a global know-how firm, it doesn’t point out precisely the place he labored. Nonetheless, a report discovered by means of his LinkedIn web page that he was as soon as employed by Amazon. TechCrunch reached out to the corporate and the spokesperson mentioned he’s now not employed there.
As per the press launch by the US Lawyer’s Workplace of the Southern District of New York, “As alleged within the indictment, Shakeeb Ahmed, who was a senior safety engineer at a global know-how firm, used his experience to defraud the trade and its customers and steal roughly $9 million in cryptocurrency. We additionally allege that he then laundered the stolen funds by means of a sequence of advanced transfers on the blockchain the place he swapped cryptocurrencies, hopped throughout completely different crypto blockchains, and used abroad crypto exchanges,” mentioned US Lawyer Damian Williams.
Cybersecurity skilled defrauds crypto trade price $9 million
Notably, the report didn’t specify the sufferer of this cyber assault. Nonetheless, a report by CoinDesk highlighted that the date and the quantity stolen match the assault on Crema Finance, a Solana-powered crypto trade. The assault happened in July 2022 and the hacker later returned practically $8 million and stored $1.7 million with himself.
The TechCrunch report additionally corroborated the data from the DOJ prosecutor, who revealed that Ahmed “had communications with the Crypto Trade by which he determined to return the entire stolen funds apart from $1.5 million if the Crypto Trade agreed to not refer the assault to legislation enforcement”.
It’s a widespread apply on the earth of cybersecurity. Such criminals name themselves white hats and declare they’ve good intentions. After stealing an enormous quantity, they may contact the sufferer entity and negotiate to return 80-85 p.c of the stolen cash, holding a “bounty” of types with themselves for exposing the safety vulnerability, if legislation enforcement isn’t referred to.
Nonetheless, it needs to be famous that, as could be seen right here, returning part of the loot, doesn’t imply that prison fees won’t be introduced upon and prosecution won’t happen. This isn’t moral hacking, even when the criminals need you to consider that.
