A $150 million heist from Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen’s digital wallet has been traced back to a security lapse at LastPass, as detailed in a forfeiture complaint submitted by U.S. authorities on March 6th.
The complaint, brought to light by blockchain analyst ZachXBT, outlines how cybercriminals gained access to Larsen’s private keys stored in LastPass, a password management tool that suffered a substantial breach in 2022.
During the LastPass breach, cyber attackers infiltrated a developer’s account, facilitating the theft of source code and technical information. By November of that year, they had breached a cloud storage system, acquiring encrypted customer password vaults and unencrypted metadata impacting roughly 25 million users. While the vaults were secured with encryption, weak or reused master passwords could be manipulated, granting unauthorized access to confidential information.
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These vulnerabilities were exploited, resulting in the theft of Larsen’s private keys and the subsequent theft of XRP worth $150 million at the time of the event, which has since soared past $600 million at current market values. ZachXBT pointed out that prior to this complaint, Larsen had not publicly revealed the details of the theft.
In January, Larsen acknowledged the incident, clarifying that the hack was confined to his personal accounts and did not affect Ripple’s corporate wallets. He has yet to provide any comments regarding the forfeiture notice.