The Tornado Cash protocol, which provides a cryptocurrency mixer service to secure transactions on the Ethereum network, was attacked by an attacker who stole and sold nearly 400,000 TORN tokens.
This was announced by a researcher from the Nansen company, which specializes in blockchain research. According to Nansen, the attacker got a wallet with 483,000 TORN, or about 10% of the total token.
He then sold 379,300 TORN on various exchanges and exchanged them for 375 ETH (around $680,000). The remaining 103,700 TORN were transferred to another address.
TORN is the governing token of the Tornado Cash protocol, which allows owners to vote on changes to the protocol and receive a portion of the funds used. In addition, TORN tokens can be used to destroy ETH or ERC-20 tokens by investing and withdrawing them through protocol smart agreements (zk-SNARKs).
Tornado Cash launched in December 2019 and has managed more than $7.6 billion in ETH. However, the protocol has caught the attention of regulators because of its ability to hide the origin and purpose of cryptocurrency.
In August 2022, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Tornado Cash, accusing it of laundering more than $7 billion in virtual currency, including $455 million of hacker group stolen in 2022 by the Lazarus Group. . associated with the North Korean government.
As a result, the protocol domain address was disabled and the GitHub repository was removed. Alexey Pertsev, one of the developers of the protocol, was arrested on suspicion of participating in hiding the criminal financial system and facilitating money laundering by mixing cryptocurrencies through the Tornado Cash service.
Tornado Cash Protocol representatives have not commented on the hacking situation and TORN token sale.