• Cuban verified that he had indeed logged into MetaMask for the first time in months.
  • On September 15, a blockchain investigator Wazz initially noticed the exploit.

Mark Cuban, billionaire businessman, allegedly had one of his hot wallets emptied of about $870k worth of cryptocurrency. On September 15 at about 8 pm UTC, a blockchain investigator Wazz initially noticed the exploit after drawing attention to unusual activity in one of Cuban’s wallets that he hadn’t used in over five months.

Etherscan’s transaction log shows that a large number of tokens were unexpectedly removed from the wallet within a short period of 10 minutes. These tokens included USDC, USDT, and Lido Staked Ether (stETH). Wazz suspected Cuban was merely shuffling funds when he saw that another $2 million in USDC had been withdrawn and transferred to a separate wallet.

Waiting to Strike

A few hours later, though, Cuban verified that he had indeed logged into MetaMask for the first time in months, and he made some oblique references to the possibility that a hacker had been waiting to strike.

Cuban also confirmed that he was the one who transferred $2 million USDC by saying that he had moved any leftover funds to Coinbase Custody. Community users were eager to point out that the hack was probably Cuban’s fault, rather than the result of hackers monitoring his online behavior.

Since the funds were sent out of the wallet without going via any intermediaries, some have speculated that Cuban may have signed a malicious transaction by accident, while others have claimed that his private key was hacked.

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