An unknown hacker stole around 37,000 VERI tokens from Veritaseum peer-to-peer platform and sold them for around $8.4 million in Ethereum during the company’s ICO (Initial Coin Offering).
Veritaseum’s founder and CEO Reggie Middleton had posted details on the hack on the BitcoinTalk forums, where he also revealed that the compromise came through a company Veritaseum was working with.
“We were hacked, possibly by a group. The hack seemed to be very sophisticated, but there is at least one corporate partner that may have dropped the ball and be liable,” he noted in one post. “A company that we use was compromised, the vulnerability was closed, and we are investigating whether we should move against that company or not,” he mentioned in another.
Apparently, the hacker was able to steal the VERI tokens during the ICO and took advantage of their high demand to sell them immediately. The company had issued 100 million tokens, meaning that the stolen amount, 37,000, represented only around 00.07% of the total. While “the amount stolen was miniscule,” Middleton said, “the dollar amount was quite material.”
“The hacker(s) made away with $8.4M worth of tokens, and dumped all of them within a few hours into a heavy cacophony of demand. This is without the public knowing anything about our last traction,” Middleton revealed.
Veritaseum’s founder pointed out that, because the tokens were stolen from the company, no user was affected. The also noted that the company doesn’t consider it necessary to buy the tokens back and that they won’t fork VERI either, although they had the option to.
What Middleton didn’t reveal was who the corporate partner supposedly involved in the heist was. He did say, however, that the company will “let the lawyers sort that out, if it goes that far.”
The $8.4 million the hacker sold the VERI tokens for ended up in two Ethereum wallets that have been already emptied.
This is the latest in a series of several high-profile hacking incidents involving the crypto-currency, starting with a breach at the Bithumb crypto-currency exchange. Last week, $7 million worth of Ethereum was stolen from CoinDash during the company’s ICO, along with $30 million worth of crypto-currency from multi-sig wallets created with Ethereum Parity clients 1.5.
Related: Hacker Steals $30 Million in Ethereum from Parity Wallets