"Largest theft in history"…KRW 370 billion wiped out after seed phrase exposure

A digital-asset investor has been found to have had a large amount of digital assets stolen in a social-engineering attack (a cyberattack that exploits a victim’s trust to steal sensitive information or system access).

On the 17th (Korea time), digital-asset news outlet Cointelegraph, citing a post by on-chain sleuth ZachXBT, reported that the largest digital-asset theft on record had occurred.

ZachXBT explained an overview of the incident via X (formerly Twitter). The theft took place on the 10th. The victim was duped by a hacker impersonating customer support for hardware-wallet maker Trezor and exposed the wallet’s seed phrase. The hacker then stole digital assets worth a total of $282 million (about KRW 370 billion) from the victim’s wallet. The stolen assets were 1,459 Bitcoin (BTC) and 2.05 million Litecoin (LTC).

The hacker later swapped the stolen assets into the privacy coin Monero (XMR) to launder the funds. As a result, Monero, which had been only $450 on the 10th, surged to as high as $788 in about five days.

The hacker also used decentralized cross-chain protocol THORChain (RUNE) to bridge-transfer part of the stolen Bitcoin to other blockchains such as Ethereum (ETH), XRP (XRP) and Litecoin.

Blockchain security firm ZeroShadow said, "The victim provided the seed phrase to an attacker impersonating support for Trezor’s 'Value Wallet.'" ZachXBT dismissed speculation that the incident was linked to state-backed hacking groups such as North Korea, saying, "It was not North Korea."