What appeared to be a large transfer of XRP was later linked to a bad actor attempting to hack the crypto exchange Bitfinex.
According to Bifinex CTO and Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino, an unknown entity attempted to use XRP Ledger’s partial payment feature, which allows users to send less than the specified amount per transfer, to attack the exchange.
The hacking attempt flagged the systems of whale watching service Whale Alert, which sent out a now-deleted message alert report that almost half of the entire XRP supply was sent in a single transfer.
Say Ardoino,
“Someone tried to attack Bitfinex via ‘Partial Payments Exploit’. [The] attack fails because Bitfinex correctly handles the ‘delivered_amount’ data field.
When attempting a partial payment, the hope is that the recipient will only read the ‘amount’ field rather than also looking at the ‘delivered’ field, and then confirm the entire transaction and be forced to refund the difference to the sender on credit . However, as Ardoino notes, BItfinex’s systems are properly configured to handle such exploit attempts on the XRPL.
Comment After Whale Alert spotted the massive fake transaction, cryptographer and former Ripple Labs executive Nik Bougalis explained the exploit attempt in more detail.
“This tweet is misleading. The transaction in question did not transfer 25B XRP.
The Whale Alert code does not understand what this transaction did and is therefore misreported.
It is a partial payment, which in reality only raised a few cents.”
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