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In the face of widespread confusion about how multiple signatories of Bybit were breached, Bybit and Safe issued an announcement at the same time on the evening of February 26.
Safe said a forensic review of Lazarus Group’s targeted attack on Bybit concluded that the attack on Bybit Safe was carried out through the hacked Safe {Wallet} developer machine, resulting in malicious transactions in disguise. Lazarus is a government-backed North Korean hacker group known for complex social engineering attacks on developers’ credentials, sometimes combined with zero-day vulnerabilities.
Forensic reviews by external security researchers did not reveal any vulnerabilities in the source code of Safe smart contracts or front-ends and services. After the recent incident, the Safe {Wallet} team conducted a thorough investigation and restored the Safe {Wallet} on the main network of Ethernet Square in stages. The Safe {Wallet} team has completely rebuilt, reconfigured all infrastructure, and rotated all credentials to ensure that attack vectors are completely eliminated. After waiting for the final results of the investigation, the Safe {Wallet} team will release a complete ex post facto analysis.
The Safe {Wallet} front end is still running and additional security measures have been taken. However, users need to be extra careful and vigilant when signing transactions.
Bybit says:
Attack time: malicious code was injected into the AWS S3 bucket of Safe {Wallet} on February 19, 2025 and triggered when Bybit performed a multisig transaction on February 21, 2025, resulting in the theft of funds.
Attack method: by tampering with the front-end JavaScript file of Safe {Wallet}, the attacker injects malicious code, modifies Bybit’s multisig transaction, and redirects funds to the attacker’s address.
Target: malicious code specifically targets Bybit’s multisig cold wallet address and a test address and is activated only under certain conditions. Post-attack action: approximately two minutes after the malicious transaction is executed, the attacker removes malicious code from the AWS S3 bucket to cover its tracks.
Investigation conclusion: the attack originated from the AWS infrastructure of Safe {Wallet} (possibly due to the disclosure or intrusion of S3 CloudFront account / API Key), and the infrastructure of Bybit itself was not attacked.
Safe Multi-signature Wallet is a cryptocurrency wallet based on blockchain intelligent contracts, which manages assets through a multiple signature (Multisig) mechanism. Its core is to require multiple predefined signers (for example, 2 out of 3, or 3 out of 5, called the MCMN mechanism) to execute the transaction. The wallet itself is a contract deployed on the block chain, recording the owner’s address and signature threshold, and the transaction needs to collect enough signatures to be verified and executed by the contract. Its technical principle depends on the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA). The signer signs the transaction with the private key and the contract is verified by the public key. The transaction proposal is first stored in the contract, the signature is collected and then submitted to the block chain for execution, which supports flexible expansion of functions such as account recovery.
Polygon Mudit Gupta questions why a developer has the right to change content on Safe production sites in the first place. In addition, why are the changes not monitored?
‘i don’t usually criticize other industry players, but Safe is using vague language to cover up the problem, ‘said CZ, founder of Yuan’an. & ldquo; hacked into the Safe {Wallet} developer machine & what does rdquo; mean? How did they hack into this particular machine? Is it social engineering, viruses, etc.? How to access the developer Machine & ldquo; account operated by Bybit & rdquo;? Some code is deployed directly from this developer machine to the production environment? How do they deceive the Ledger verification steps of multiple signers? Is it a blind visa? Or did the signer not verify it correctly? Is $1.4 billion the largest address managed using Safe? Why don’t they target others? Others & ldquo; self-hosting, multi-signature & what lessons can rdquo; wallet providers and users learn from it? In addition, CZ denied that Qian an also used Safe to preserve assets.
Slow fog cosine indicates that Safe does have no problem with the smart contract part (it is easy to verify on the chain), but the front end has been tampered with to achieve the deceptive effect. As for why it was tampered with, wait for the Safe official details to be disclosed. Safe is a kind of security infrastructure, and in theory, anyone who signs a wallet with it could be stolen like Bybit. If you think about it, all other users with front-end, API and other user interaction services may have this risk. This is also a classic supply chain attack. The security management model of large / large assets needs to be greatly upgraded. If the Safe front end does basic SRI verification, even if the js is changed, nothing will happen. CoSine said he wouldn’t be surprised if the safe’s dev was a North Korean agent.
Constantine, director of GCC, said that this is a major blow to the industry, the so-called decentralized public goods, single point of risk, even in a few ordinary contract front-end developers, there is almost no security to speak of. In addition to safe, a large number of web3 open source dependency are at risk of similar supply chain attacks, which are not only weak in risk control, but also rely heavily on traditional Internet infrastructure to ensure security.
Hasu said that while the Safe front-end rather than the Bybit infrastructure had been compromised, the Bybit infrastructure was not sufficient to prevent the eventual fairly simple hacker attack. When transferring more than $1 billion, there is no reason not to verify message integrity on the second quarantine machine.
The core, says Mingdao, is that large capital signature transactions should be generated by permanently offline computers. As long as the initiator of the transaction is signed offline and broadcast through a networked computer, there will be no problem for others to sign. All the multi-signers run naked on the networked computer and rely on the networked web page to generate transactions, and the cold wallet becomes hot. This is not safe’s pot, after all, it has no escrow money. It just unfortunately became the central point of trust.
Vitalik has also said that 90 per cent of his personal assets are held in Safe.
Wintermute’s founders say it’s not that Bybit’s security measures are perfect (it looks like they may be the largest multi-signed accounts using the SAF E protocol). It may make more sense if they use solutions such as Fireblocks or Fordefi, combined with other measures, especially when dealing with simple capital transfers.
Read more:
Bybit was robbed of nearly $1.5 billion how did North Korean hackers do it in the largest theft in human history?
The second day of the biggest theft in history: Bybit self-rescue and industry collective support; how will North Korean hackers realize; reflect on the current security model
GuShiio.com talks with Bybit BEN and Shunyet: explain in detail the cause of the theft of US $1.5 billion, rescue progress and future arrangements
