JAKARTA - Amber Group in a blog post, has recently reproduced the Wintermute hack, a Hong Kong-based financial service provider. The process is fast and simple as well as hardware used easy to access by consumers. Wintermute lost more than $160 million in private key hacking on September 20.
Reproducting the hack could help build a better understanding of the surface spectrum of attacks across Web3," Amber Group said in a blog that Cointelegraph quoted Cointelegraph. Just hours after the hack, UK-based crypto market maker Wintermute revealed that researchers could blame the address generator Profantity.
An analyst suggested that the hack was insider work, but that conclusion was rejected by Wintermute and others. Profanity's vulnerability was known before the Wintermute hack surfaced.
We have reproduced the recent Wintermute hack. Figured out the algorithm to build the exploit. We were able to reproduce the private key on a MacBook M1 with 16G memory in <48h. Full writeup coming in the next few days.
— Amber Group (@ambergroup_io) September 27, 2022
Amber Group could reproduce the hack in less than 48 hours after its initial preparation, which took less than 11 hours. Amber Group uses the Macbook M1 with 16GB of RAM in its research. It was much faster and used simpler equipment than how analysts previously predicted the hack would happen, according to Amber Group.
Amber Group details the processes used in the re-hack, from getting public keys to reconstructing personal keys, and explains vulnerabilities in the way Profanity generates random numbers for the keys they produce.
The group noted that the description was not meant to be complete. He added, repeating messages that had been widely distributed before:
It's also well documented at this point, your funds are not safe if your address is created by Profancy. Always manage your personal keys carefully. Don't believe it, verify," said Amber Group.
The Amber Group blog has been technically oriented from the start, and has been discussing security issues before. The group reached a valuation of $3 billion in February following a round of Series B+ funding investments.
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