Ripple Co-Founder Loses $150 Million in XRP to Cyberattack

ZachXBT has disclosed that Chris Larsen, Ripple’s co-founder, suffered a crypto lack of roughly $150 million in January 2024.
Investigators linked the theft to the 2022 LastPass breach, the place hackers exploited stolen credentials from encrypted vaults to entry Chris Larsen’s personal keys.

The large theft of 283 million, valued at $150 million on the time, from Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen’s private accounts in January 2024 has been linked to a safety breach involving the LastPass password supervisor. In line with a U.S. regulation enforcement forfeiture grievance shared by blockchain investigator ZachXBT, the compromised personal keys had beforehand been saved in LastPass earlier than being deleted.

Larsen’s stolen XRP, now valued at roughly $683 million, was drained from accounts secured by 4 units related to the password supervisor. Upon discovering the breach, Larsen confirmed that it was restricted to his private accounts and didn’t affect Ripple itself. “We had been capable of catch the issue early and notify exchanges to freeze the affected addresses. Regulation enforcement is already concerned,” Larsen said.

Monitoring and Laundering of the Stolen XRP

LastPass, a broadly used password supervisor, suffered two main breaches in 2022. The primary occurred in August when hackers accessed components of the corporate’s supply code, API tokens, and multi-factor authentication (MFA) seeds. In November, attackers leveraged knowledge from the preliminary breach to infiltrate encrypted password vaults and buyer knowledge. It’s estimated that round $35 million in cryptocurrency was stolen from 150 victims. The FBI later related this compromised knowledge to a number of crypto-related thefts, highlighting the far-reaching penalties of the breaches.

ZachXBT, a blockchain investigator, tracked the stolen XRP because it moved throughout numerous cryptocurrency exchanges, together with Binance, Kraken, OKX, HTX, MEXC, Gate.io, and HitBTC. Hackers often use a number of platforms to launder stolen belongings, making it difficult to recuperate misplaced funds. Moreover, ZachXBT famous that addresses linked to Larsen proceed to carry a big quantity of XRP. Reviews recommend these addresses maintain over 2.7 billion XRP, exceeding $7 billion in worth.

Cybersecurity consultants emphasize that non-public keys and seed phrases ought to by no means be saved in password managers or cloud-based providers. As a substitute, they advocate preserving them offline, both on paper in a safe location or inside {hardware} wallets. Some safety professionals additionally advise splitting seed phrases into a number of sections for added safety.

Regardless of its historical past of safety breaches, LastPass continues to actively promote its providers on social media, drawing sharp criticism from ZachXBT. The investigator accused LastPass of downplaying the severity of its 2022 breaches, which led to vital cryptocurrency thefts. He additionally highlighted that regulation enforcement now publicly acknowledges LastPass’s position in these incidents and warned customers in opposition to counting on the platform for safe password administration.

As defined in an earlier protection, ZachXBT additionally uncovered that the notorious Lazarus Group, a North Korean state-backed hacking syndicate, was answerable for the huge $1.4 billion Ethereum theft from cryptocurrency trade Bybit. In the meantime, XRP is at present buying and selling at $2.31 after an 8.62% drop within the final 24 hours, with its buying and selling quantity lowering by 10.33% to $7.37 billion.

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