According to the Cryptocurrency Anti-Money Laundering Reportfrom Ciphertrace some $927 million had been stolen from cryptocurrency exchanges in the first three quarters of 2018 alone. That total will almost certainly have hit, if not smashed straight through, the $1 billion mark by now. So, who were the hackers behind the heists and how did they get away with it? The how remains sadly predictable throughout the year, truth be told; exploiting vulnerabilities in crypto wallet software and servers, social engineering/password compromises and insider theft. The who covers equally predictable territory with lone wolf criminal opportunists at the lower end of scale through to well-resourced nation-state actors at the other.
So, there’s a 21 year old opportunist criminal who managed to steal $1 million from the Coinbase and Gemini accounts of San Francisco resident Robert Ross after convincing the victims mobile network provider to assign that phone number to his own device. Once he had succeeded in this SIM-swapping endeavor, an increasingly common method used to compromise otherwise secure accounts by gaining access to two-factor authentication codes sent via SMS, the criminal was able to access the crypto accounts with relative ease.