By CCN: Gatehub Founder and CEO Enej Pungercar wrote a public letter disclosing that the company’s infrastructure had been compromised and at least 100 wallets were likely affected. The letter explains that an exploit was located in the company’s API, which enabled certain wallets to be affected. Users were urged to get their money off of Gatehub and into other XRP wallets while the issue was investigated.
Users were urged to move XRP to other wallets. | Source: Twitter
Centralized XRP Wallets Compromised
Most cryptocurrencies have some form of a web wallet. For some, like Monero and Ethereum, web wallets represent a large portion of users. Maintaining a full node of either software is a labor-intensive process. Most people prefer to simply log in, do business, and log out.
The same, of course, holds for XRP. Gatehub is one of several services that enable people to quickly create XRP wallets. Accordingly, a good number of these wallets were recently compromised.
“API requests to the victim’s accounts were all authorized with a valid access token. There were no suspicious logins detected, nor there were any signs of brute forcing. […] We have however detected an increased amount of API calls (with valid access tokens) coming from a small number of IP addresses which might be how the perpetrator gained access to encrypted secret keys.”
Gatehub is reportedly still working to figure out what happened and whether their system remains at risk. Working with law enforcement and security professionals, the firm hopes to get things back to normal soon.
Will people still trust them? It’s a big question in this space, and you never know what will happen.