Cryptocurrency Firm Itself Hacked Its Customers to Protect Their Funds From Hackers

Jun 6, 2019

Are you using Komodo’s Agama Wallet to store your KMD and BTC
cryptocurrencies?

Were your funds also unauthorisedly transferred overnight to a
new address?

If yes, don’t worry, it’s probably safe, and if you are lucky,
you will get your funds back.

Here’s what exactly happened…

Komodo, a cryptocurrency project and developer of Agama Wallet,
adopted a surprisingly unique way to protect its customers’
funds.

The company hacked its customers and unauthorisedly transferred
nearly 8 million KMD and 96 Bitcoins from their cryptocurrency
wallets to a new address owned by the company.

Why? To secure funds of its customers from hackers.

This may sound weird, but it’s true.

Komodo recently learned ^[1] about a malicious open
source, third-party JavaScript library that the company was using
in its Agama Wallet app.

The library, named “electron-native-notify,” recently received a
new update from its anonymous author who included a secret backdoor
in the code that was designed to steal and send wallet
seeds/private key and other login passphrases of Agama Wallet users
to a remote server.

So, it turns out that if you have logged in to any version of
Agama Wallet downloaded from Komodo’s official website or their
Android and iOS apps after 13 April this year, it’s likely you’ve
had your wallet credentials stolen.

The malicious library update in question was initially detected
by a security team at npm JavaScript package repository service,
who then informed Komodo of the issue.

“The attack was carried out by using a pattern that is becoming
more and more popular; publishing a useful package
(electron-native-notify) to npm, waiting until it was in use by the
target, and then updating it to include a malicious payload,” the
npm blog ^[2] said.

The npm blog also shared a brief video demonstration showing how
the backdoored version of Agama wallet has been secretly sending a
wallet’s private seed to a remote server in the background.
After discovering the vulnerability, Komodo decided to use similar
password stealing technique against its users to gain access to as
many affected wallets as possible and transferred their funds to a
safe wallet before hackers could have stolen them.

“The safe wallets RSgD2cmm3niFRu2kwwtrEHoHMywJdkbkeF (KMD) and
1GsdquSqABxP2i7ghUjAXdtdujHjVYLgqk (BTC) are under the control of
the Komodo Team, and assets can be reclaimed by their owners,”
Komodo said.

However, it’s important to note that not all affected user wallets
have been emptied by the company.

So, if your wallet has not been swept, you are strongly
recommended to immediately move all your funds from Agama to a new
address.

Komodo also said that the Verus version of its Agama wallet is
not affected by this vulnerability and is still completely secure,
as it doesn’t include the malicious library in question. So, users
of Verus version of Agama wallet are not affected by the security
incident.

References

^{^}
learned
(komodoplatform.com)
^{^}
npm blog
(blog.npmjs.org)

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OWASP TOP !0

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Cryptocurrency Firm Itself Hacked Its Customers to Protect Their Funds From Hackers

References

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