On January 14, an eye-catching report surfaced regarding a substantial $15 billion XRP transaction from an undisclosed wallet to Bitfinex.
However, it soon became apparent that this transaction had never actually transpired. Bitfinex’s Chief Technology Officer, Paolo Ardoino, shed light on the situation, revealing that it was, in fact, an unsuccessful attempt at a “partial payments exploit.”
The initial revelation of the supposed transfer came from Whale Alert, a prominent blockchain tracking account that formerly operated on Twitter.
Whale Alert claimed to have spotted a transaction involving a staggering 25.6 billion XRP – nearly half of the total XRP supply – moving from an unidentified wallet to Bitfinex.
However, Whale Alert later deleted the post and attributed the error to “an issue with properly reading the Ripple node response, resulting in a few wrong posts.”
Paolo Ardoino, in a subsequent explanation on the platform X, clarified that the incident was an attempted attack on Bitfinex through a “Partial Payments Exploit.”
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The attacker seemed to have believed that Bitfinex had improperly configured its software to process partial payments.
The mechanics of a partial payments exploit involve assuming that a company’s system only reads the amount field of an XRP transaction, which is intentionally set to a high value.
The exploiter then sends a significantly smaller amount, specified in another transaction field, in an attempt to receive credit for the difference.
However, Ardoino affirmed that Bitfinex thwarted this attack because it correctly manages the ‘delivered_amount’ data field.
Notably, the attacker didn’t limit their efforts to Bitfinex alone. Blockchain data revealed that they also targeted Binance with a 58.9 billion XRP transfer, mirroring the unsuccessful outcome of the attack on Bitfinex.
In conclusion, what initially appeared as a colossal XRP transaction turned out to be a failed exploit attempt.
Bitfinex’s robust security measures successfully prevented any unauthorized manipulation of their systems, and the attacker’s ambitions to exploit vulnerabilities were thwarted.
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