WazirX Hack Pushes Shiba Inu (SHIB) Price Down by 10%

Shiba Inu (SHIB) price has crashed more than 10% with a majority of the selling pressure coming in the last few hours following reports of the hack of crypto exchange WazirX. As of press time, Shiba Inu (SHIB) price is at $0.00001714 with a market cap of $10.1 billion. 

As per on-chain reports, the WazirX exploiter managed to steal 5.4 trillion SHIB tokens valued at $100 million. Reportedly, the exploiter has started selling the SHIB coins in huge quantities. This development has cast a shadow on Shiba Inu’s short-term outlook.

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Note that #WazirX exploiter has started selling $SHIB!#WazirX exploiter has sold 35B $SHIB($618K) and currently holds 5.4T $SHIB($95.45M).https://t.co/nRHmm24ZSl pic.twitter.com/DRzmaIbiqH

— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) July 18, 2024

Apart from Shiba Inu, the hacker also obtained $52 million in Ether (ETH), $11 million in Polygon (MATIC), $4.7 million in Floki (FLOKI), $3.2 million in Fantom (FTM), $2.8 million in Chainlink (LINK), and $2.3 million in Fetch.ai (FET). All these cryptocurrencies have declined in price following the WazirX security breach.

As per data from Elliptic, the hack was conducted by North Korea’s Lazarus Group. The notorious Lazarus Group has stolen cryptocurrencies worth billions of dollars in the past few years. In an email to Bloomberg, Tom Robinson, co-founder of Elliptic, said:

“The North Korea attribution is based on similarities in the types of services used by these hackers in the past, as well as similarities in their transactional behavior.”

According to Yajin Zhou, CEO of security firm BlockSec, the hack occurred due to the leakage of a private key that granted access to the wallet. Zhou said:

“The leaked private keys are used to upgrade a safe multi-sig wallet, which holds a large number of assets, to a malicious contract. Then the malicious contract is used to drain most of the assets in the safe wallet.”

Shiba Inu’s Technical Chart Shows a Weakness

The Shiba Inu meme coin has dropped by 15% after facing major resistance through a confluence of factors such as the upper trendline of its descending channel, the 50-day (red) and 200-day (blue) exponential moving averages (EMA), and a previously established support-turned-resistance zone.

Shiba Inu’s community members have reacted to the development stating there’s no reason to panic. Lucie, Shiba Inu’s marketing head, expressed concerns for India’s Shiba Inu investors.

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