It looks like most of the stolen IOTA tokens which were lost during a $11 Million USD hack that happened recently we found. We covered this story a few days ago and now it looks like the situation will finally have its proper happy ending.
Police officers from the United Kingdom’s South East Regional Organized Crime Unit have arrested a man which was charged with stealing the money, around $10 million EUR ($11.4 million USD) and quickly were able to get most of the money back.
According to the official report from the IOTA Foundation, which is set in Germany, most of the money is now being held by the law enforcement while the authorities intend to use it in the case against the suspect. This means that, while the money will eventually go back to its owner, this will only happen after the case is finished.
Now, after the hack, IOTA has decided to make a partnership with the Ledger Hardware Wallet in order to provide more protection for its customers against similar kinds of threats.
The Hack
It all started when a man from Oxford, England, has stolen the money. He stole it from over 85 people during the course of six to eight months, but he was eventually caught by the local authorities, together with the Europol.
The U. K. and Germany joined forces to apprehend the man, which was 26 years old. He used a malicious IOTA seed generator to basically create a backdoor that could let him access the funds of the victims. According to the reports, he was active from August 2017 to the start of 2018 and used the backdoors to enter the wallets and transfer the funds out.
People would enter the site to generate private keys that were long and secure, but they did not know that, in fact, there was someone else that knew the keys for the wallets and used this knowledge to steal from them.
According to the Europol, the hacker was nicknamed “Norbertvberg” and he posed as a member of the IOTA community in order to gain the trust of the victims. After the police discovered the plot, he was investigated and arrested.
The police were surprised to see that the criminal was a very well educated man with a “normal job”. Currently, the man is responding for fraud, theft and money laundering.
Now, as soon as the case is done, it looks like there is finally some hope for the people who lost their funds.
