$1.5 Billion XRP Transferred to Bitfinex Exchange! CTO: Successful Prevention of Vulnerability Attack

$1.5 Billion XRP Transferred to Bitfinex Exchange! CTO: Successful Prevention of Vulnerability Attack

$1.5 Billion XRP Transferred to Bitfinex Exchange! CTO: Successful Prevention of Vulnerability Attack

$1.5 Billion XRP Transfer?
Partial Payment Vulnerability Attack
According to information broadcasted by Whale Alert, a platform that tracks on-chain data, a transaction involving a total of 2.56 billion XRP was transferred from an unknown wallet to Bitfinex yesterday (14th).

As soon as this on-chain transaction notification was released, it immediately sparked discussions in the market. This transaction represents almost half of the total circulating supply of XRP, with a total value of nearly $15 billion. However, Whale Alert later deleted this tweet and stated that it was a result of an error caused by abnormal behavior from the Ripple node.
Subsequently, Paolo Ardoino, the CTO of Bitfinex, came forward and stated that this transaction was, in fact, a “partial payment vulnerability attack” targeting the exchange. However, Bitfinex successfully identified and blocked this attempted attack.
The partial payment vulnerability exploits certain system configuration flaws in companies (such as the erroneous tweet from Whale Alert). This flaw refers to the fact that the company’s system only checks the “amount” field in XRP transactions, and this field can be set to a very high number. However, in reality, the fraudsters only send an actual amount much smaller than this “amount” field. Their intention is to make the company mistakenly believe that they have paid a large sum of money, thereby obtaining the price difference that was not actually paid by the company.
Fortunately, Bitfinex’s system recognized the actual paid amount, not just the displayed amount in the transaction, and was not affected by this attempted attack.
Furthermore, blockchain data also shows that the attackers transferred 5.89 billion XRP to Binance in an attempt to carry out the same attack, but they also ultimately failed.