Arbitrum: Hacker compromised 2,400 wallets to sweep ARB tokens upon launch

Arkham Intelligence reports that in the last 24 hours, a hacker falsely approved the ARB airdrop.
The hacker then went on to transfer money to 2,400 wallets.
Arbitrum’s ARB token is set to be launched on March 23, with estimations placing it under or around $1.

Arbitrum is the biggest thing in the crypto space at the moment as the Decentralised Exchanges (DEX) prepares to launch its native token, ARB. However, per evidence, this altcoin might just have become the first crypto token to be hacked even before its launch.

Arbitrum wallets hacked!

According to Arkham intelligence, on Monday, a hacker was found to have transferred money to about 2,400 wallets, all linked to the upcoming Arbitrum ARB token launch. Per Arkham, the hacker did this to gain access to the ARB that would be airdropped into these wallets. Arkham tweeted,

"these are 2400 wallets for which the hacker somehow accessed the seed phrase/private key. he approved $arb on the 0x59 contract - in order to sweep all the ARB out of the wallets by calling a function through the contract, rather than attempting to submit transactions individually. (sic)

These 2,400 wallets are part of the 625,000 wallets that have been deemed eligible for the airdrop. Approving the ARB airdrop for these wallets will allow the hacker to gain access to these tokens and eventually dump them all when the token is launched.

Token approval refers to an address allowing another address to move the ERC20 tokens held on its account.

pic - pic.twitter.com/Ev9a8ZTqSF
— Arkham (@ArkhamIntel) March 20, 2023

In the case of this hack, this would mean that the attacker would be able to move the ARB tokens from the victim's addresses.

ARB token estimated price

Ahead of the token launch, there has been a lot of speculation as to what ARB will be priced at. The estimations made by users have been based on the native token of Optimsim, OP.

Akin to Arbitrum, Optimism is also a layer-2 solution for Ethereum, which at a fully diluted valuation of $10.5 billion, has 7-8% of all its tokens available for trading, placing its total value at $930 million.

Similarly, considering a similar valuation in the case of ARB, with about 12% of all tokens available for trading, the price of the token could go up to $1. However, the final value of the cryptocurrency would completely depend on the demand, and macroeconomic conditions come March 23.

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