'Twitter Will Be Fun Today': The College-Age Kids Who Hacked Into Twitter - Ep. 135

Transcript

hi everyone welcome to unconfirmed the podcast that reveals how the marquee names and crypto are reacting to the week's top headlines and gets the inside scoop on what they see on the horizon i'm your host laura shin unchained and unconfirmed right now published his videos if you're not yet subscribed to the unchained youtube channel head to youtube.com c unchained podcast and subscribe today crypto.com is waiving the 3.5 credit card fee for all crypto purchases download the crypto.com app today need cash but don't want to sell your crypto use nexo's instant crypto credit lines and withdraw funds today starting from only 5.9 apr create an account at nexo.io tcorum is a weekly virtual series about

all things tazos every wednesday tune in for presentations about the latest advancements that help the ecosystem grow together learn more at tcorum.com today's guest is haseeb awan ceo of ifani a secure and private cell phone service welcome haseeb thank you laura for having me on the show you were one of the investigators in touch with the young people who hacked twitter last week and gained control of prominent accounts including those of joe biden barack obama elon musk and others as well as those of crypto companies like coinbase and binance and when they had control of those accounts they were soliciting bitcoin from twitter users how did you get in touch with the hackers

so laura i been like same stuff full time myself so then after i was so pissed off that i was actually very very angry that i said i need to solve this problem and so i went into those forms and i realized you know how they hack those accounts how they get into account how do like pretty much all the ring of how they operate when you say that they had had your twitter account no they hacked my sims out me four times you know okay and when you say sim swaps just describe that in case listeners don't think they probably do but so sim fap is pretty much what happened is like someone will just take over a cell phone so the underground market like think about ebay but like there's underground market where people sell information so they'll sell your name your information your social security

number your call logs your life even your live location or anything on you if i say hey i need to find out what laura shin telephone number and they'll give me telephone number uh they will give me a call log they will give me and everything comes to telephone number because telephone number is very unique and then if i say hey i need to take over the cell phone number because i need so they will just transfer it to sim that i control and i just need to pay them a few dollars and now your phone will not work anymore because i have the control of sim card so then i use that telephone number to get into your gmail facebook another account on twitter so if you go on twitter and you do password reset then likely to send it to email or telephone

number if this telephone number you got control of someone so that's a very common technique that's deployed across the us uh for longest time so in the case of the twitter hack twitter said that their employees had been socially engineered and that's how these hackers gain control the system so are you saying that some twitter employees had their account sim swapped like how how just the fact that you were sim swapped by these people relate to the twitter hack correct so you wanted to ask me like how did i get in touch with them so i'm trying to understand so i'm trying to tell you that uh whenever sims ups i started going into this industry into this forum then trying to see how they operate and through that i set up my ifani so which we provide and we made a career

that probably that cannot be sims up that's what we did and after that uh when we started getting customers we were actually getting a lot of attempts too so we were getting attempts pretty much every week that someone tried to symptom our customer trying to like hack into our system and when they failed i got in contact they will make you call they will email you and then they will like you know message you and they will do all kind of attacks you know they'll try to like paint like you know pen tests like you know everything they did and obviously in one of the cases they reached out to me and i said you know like guys like stop like you know messing around here right i know what you're up to and after so i got in touch with him through signal and after that

we just like no i won't say like you know become a friend but i told them why you're doing this like you know you should not do this multiple hackers and they said okay you know we don't have anything to do pretty much i said okay why don't you get a job he said you know let's do a job and then they start feeding me all the information to prove that hey they're legit they know a lot of information and that's how i was getting information from a lot of hackers about and when did all this happen that you got in touch with them and had all these it happened like four or five months ago okay yeah they were they were reaching out to me not just for this hack but like for other purposes too right like okay you know this account like

there's a lot of databases which get reached every day so they wanted to see that hey if i'm interested in buying the database they just wanted to work so they're pretty much passing out because it's not just about money it's also about ego that they want to prove something that they're able to do something so so my contacts were not hacking but they were basically into this form so they had access to their forums uh because uh i didn't want to access those forms so they were passing me hey today this is for sale this person is for sale tomorrow this person for sale so on the day of twitter attack i similarly got a message that twitter will be fun today and when i got this message uh i thought it would be like i just twitter bots that are running like you know like

twitter scam giveaway scams and but after a while i saw that coinbase got attacked and you know finance account taken over and at that point of time i thought that it's just maybe a third party api like you know you have services like you know where you schedule your tweets and everything i thought that may be compromised and that's how they got but after a while they say no we have everything a screenshot i tweeted out the screenshot and after that things just blew up wow and so who are these people who who were the people involved in the actual twitter hack so it's difficult to tell the identity like frankly i don't know i can speculate but obviously because of someone's security and privacy i don't want to speculate but i can tell you one thing these are like just college kids or maybe like

someone between 8 maybe 18 to 21 22 and they are video gamers they met up forums and they just found this thing to be fascinating for them this like a game like you know you go on a video game and you kill and you do stuff so for them it's like that uh they probably are living in somewhere with their parents right now in a basement who does not even know anything uh and they just do it for fun obviously money's there too but mostly it's fun for them it's just a thrill and so originally um the way you got in touch with them was they were targeting these different cell phone accounts and what is their motivation in taking over the different cell phone accounts so by cell phone account you can

actually so when people take your cell phone account they can actually destroy you financially emotionally and reputationally so by financially i can say they can get into your account your bank accounts they can buy crypto through that uh they can bypass a lot of levels of security so that's financially they can do uh obviously they can get into facebook and and email too and then they uh download all the information from your facebook and then they start blackmailing you that hey like like when laura you have done this like you know you have this client and you have to pay me this i'll i'll put this information out there and a lot of people will have to pay them the money because if they don't pay the money uh they lose their reputation right so and then third parties they just become tortured in my case they were torturing me

um when they used to take my account they knew they cannot get into anything but they wanted to torture me it's just fun for them like people i think people are sick and like how did they pick you out of all the different people that they could torture also they pick like it's not just me like every day hundreds of people get sinful so i'm just one of them on average every second three americans become victim of simsa not simsa but cyber crimes so it's not like but i had the impression that this was primarily targeting cryptocurrency people but you were saying no it's anybody no i think 80 percent of people uh who are simcept after our cryptocurrency people oh wow and then in in the cases of those people is it like personal vendettas that they're

trying to know you can you can make more money by hacking a lower cell phone than anything else you know cryptocurrency is one thing but lawyer is like one number one target lawyer and health care professionals like doctor medical doctors and uh and lawyers are the number one target of sin suffers and what is the motivation for targeting lawyers and audiences money so and how do they monetize that uh yeah so i tell you like doctors are basically busy less tech savvy and are rich it's very easy to find out anyone's doctor information you can find out who's the best doctor in the city and you can sims up him um and once you get into their account you can transfer money between accounts you can buy cryptocurrencies like people have been uh going into the account sims upping

calling to the bank making a wire transfer and then just taking all their accounts so that's very common similarly for for doctors who like clinics have a lot of money if you're going to clinic it's very easy to transfer even like five hundred thousand to a million dollar just over the phone because that's like a general transaction for them okay so let's go back to the twitter hack there were some names that were identified of people who were involved these names came up in the new york times article that quoted you as a source one was kirk there were some other people lol and ever so anxious who were these people and how did they know each other so they don't know each other like they are not best party they just hang out on

rooms like you know chatting channels uh like like similar like people on twitter they talked about these are private channels where people uh go if they want to have information so this is a dark web industry for finding information so if i want someone a social security number i just repeat someone or get call log so these people create those information and you ask about like uh like imagine you're a lawyer and you are fighting for my opponent case people can go to their websites and buy their call logs and see where they are who they're talking to so they can uh make some intelligence on them uh that's one thing but other than that these people are just like i said gamers like you know they would play like you know different video games and kirk is the guy who was basically a source so the way

industry works is there'll be escrow agents and they are in room for a long time and they will says obviously you want to you want something and you don't trust a new guy because the new guy who is basically the main culprit uh they keep on changing the identity because of multiple reasons but the main guy remained the same so imagine this could ever switch had a decent reputation so if you go to say and you i want like a username of laura at their laura shin and it's inactive you may not trust kirk so you went to this middle guy and tell them hey can you hold the money for me because you have a good reputation because like ebay these forums generally have reputation systems you know so when you uh went to this guy like you know every show anxious uh he went to

concert prepended that he's a twitter employee but i don't think he was a twitter employee and then he gave him the accounts they started building trust so this guy was just a middleman he was just broken deals you tell him what you want he will just keep his cut and transfer the money when the deal is completed that's all and so so kirk was pretty was saying that he was a twitter employee but yes but as you said you don't think that he was and he was essentially selling valuable twitter accounts and if people didn't trust kirk they would use ever so anxious as their middleman to get the different twitter handles that they wanted is that what happened

that's correct because kirk only made an account on i think july of uh 11th of july it was very recently that he actually came so obviously you will not trust someone in that soon uh yeah i think it's said july seventh in the new york times article i think it's july 11th okay but all right so but ever so anxious had a longer reputation and um and that was who people were transacting with and so then how did bitcoin come into this uh well all the transactions on these forms happen through bitcoins so the way it started was they were selling the twitter handles for bitcoin and then later how did the scam change so i personally think this is what i

personally think that kirk was in touch with the twitter employee who was giving these accounts uh for a few thousand dollars and then either kirk bribed him or social engineered him like because like hey can i do a screenshot so this is my this is purely my speculation that you're working for so long he won the trust and he may have said hey can i see the login for a bit i want to see how it looks like or something or he made it something so the guy just passed on hey just do it but don't do anything crazy you know and but kirk just said okay man i can just go on finance and do it oh i can also go on coinbase i can do it i can also go on like you know all those accounts and then he went crazy that's what i like okay okay but

you're just speculating you don't have any proof of that or or do you no like one no i don't have any proof of that i the only proof i have is that click probably do it and kirk is uh probably a guy called goku which is on darker form for a long time so we speculate that he's someone that was in the industry for a while but no absolutely i have no proof that kik did it but from all the action and everything it all points to a kirk all right so in a moment we're gonna talk a little bit more about what happened exactly uh inside twitter and and with this scam but first a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible how much in fees are you paying for crypto purchases now crypto.com is waiving the 3.5 credit

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podium next sign up and learn more about the virtual series at tcorum.com back to my conversation with haseeb awan so we don't know exactly how kirk got into twitter's internal systems um however once um he or she did then what did he do or she do with their power so assumingly it was kirk then they went to buy i think they start with binance and coinbase and the ceo of finance and he made his account he reset that so first of all what they did was

they removed all the 2fa on the account okay which means when you log in it asks you to do a second type of security which is hopefully if you're in the crypto space you have used something like google authenticator or a ubi key and you're not using text message based second factor authentication you know where they send a code to your phone because otherwise if you get sim swapped then then it's like having no but yeah so but anyway so they remove that and then keep going second thing they added was a secondary email you know like a separate email they replace the email or they added a secondary email so now i'll give example like you have my username receive so they remove 2fa and they also remove

change my email and then they uh did a password reset so the new email got the password request so then they change the password got into the account and uh tweeted whatever they wanted wow and what were they tweeting so they were tweeting that you know uh you know about code 19 i believe like you know fund crypto because of covered we are like helping people i don't remember the recording crypto for health yeah crypto for health or something and they said you know like send like bitcoins to the address will return you back and this is a very very common scam and crypto uh you can see on youtube actually they were so good that frankly sometime i get like you know oh my god like

they are able to make it like like for a second you think it's real you know and like but this happens pretty commonly and and it's happening for almost like two or three years now i don't know if it really is the kind of thing where people will think it's real i honestly uh had created a question for you which is who are the people who are savvy enough to own bitcoin and know how to send it but not savvy enough to spot what to me seemed like an obvious scam yeah well i actually uh went on the internet and i tweeted out this thing same thing i said like who are those people who can have sophisticated enough to buy bitcoin but not like stupid to send bitcoin but i think greed takes

over everything like i think when it's agreed people think okay let's give it a chance you know it's like a lottery ticket you know uh people may be deep but they think about what if this is true and other than that like if you like elon musk happening because there are actually philanthropy efforts on twitter all the time where people are just donating money on twitter but they don't ask for anything they say hey can you give me your i have a friend edwin who does this every day so he will give twenty dollars to or fifty dollars to every person every day you say hey retweet this i'll give you this money so this happens right now and obviously um and said it's all about greed like you know when read comes in people people forget everything that's why you know we have so many ponzi schemes we have like so

many scammers that happen that exist even today because if i come to you and i say laura i have an investment scheme and you know which is a very very good and you know you hear all the materials but it only gives you five percent you may not listen to that but they say hey lord there's a chance to make tennis money tomorrow you may like skip everything you know you say okay man i thousand already turned into ten 10 000 tomorrow okay i'll take the risk something like that okay hopefully i'm sure my listeners are savvy enough to know if it sounds too good to be true um yeah i know i know but people apparently do that like you know i think uh i have estimated that around like maybe i think just in this twitter giveaway scam like i think people are lost like tens of

millions of dollars and well not last week but no not over time over time yeah yeah well people have been sending money so there are enough fools i guess yeah and over i mean for last week the the hackers did net about a little over 13 bitcoin which was about 120 thousand dollars although chain alice has said that about 20 000 of it seems to have come from a suspicious address that they actually think was controlled by the hackers to kind of make it look like this was legit and people were actually sending money um but then also by the way they could have netted more however coinbase said that it did prevent more than 1 000 customers from sending

about 280 000 worth of bitcoin to the twitter hackers so all right so let's talk a little bit also about just what happened in twitter which was in a twitter blog post the hackers targeted 130 accounts for 45 of those they reset the password and sent tweets from those accounts for eight of them they actually downloaded the account's data and then for 36 they looked at the direct message inbox including one elected official from the netherlands and so what do you think they could do with such information i think it's a similar black meaning that i've been talking to you about what happened with sim shopping like think about it if you have um first of all these guys are full and that's

why they didn't it wasn't like pre-planned i don't believe it was just like you know in the moon in the hero moment it just happened uh and they just like it's like crazy guy who just got drunk and pretty much did everything but i think if you have access to like anyone's social media personal social media like i have been i've received anonymous direct messages and i but i don't believe that i think they are forged i don't believe they're like real so but if you imagine you have someone social media and that may be confidential information that can be misused by states even like if you do abide in personal direct messages you know that's not confidence and even with the journalist or whistleblowers you know so i don't know whose information was was accessed

but that's very very very concerning and i believe this may happen on facebook or other social media platform as well because they're susceptible to the same attack factor yeah i definitely think that this is um one of those cases where it makes you want to just use encrypted social messaging apps um such as like signal or something maybe whatsapp so let's just also know talk a little bit about what we said before about how the hackers were able to remove two-factor authentication on these accounts well actually what they did first was they changed the email address they removed the 2fa and then they changed email address oh

actually but on um there were there was a there was an email sorry there was a blog post by somebody who had the at six twitter account yeah and they said that they believed that the hackers changed the email address but that when that happened it did not send a notification to the original email address but do you i don't know if this person was surmising yeah no so six has a very interesting history so six belong to a hacker uh there's a community of hackers go with the 2600 that's like a code for hackers right uh not a court but just like you know community for hackers and he was a hacker who ended up like homeless and he was able to attack into i think he was jail two and he went into multiple he was homeless but he was a

hacker and that's the community belong to that sixth username is basically of i believe his username and but yes but i think the first 2fa was removed and then email was removed but it didn't matter the person who has control of it now i thought it was the reverse but either way in it like for any of us who are in the crypto space who have been keeping up with our security and using things like google authenticator or ub key and avoiding uh text message based 2fa or any kind of 2fa based on our phone number what lesson can we take away from this like is there any advice that you have for crypto people and how they can protect themselves if the services that we use have

loopholes like this but certainly i'll be biased and obviously you know uh will self-really promote like ifani here but that's what we do right we basically work but a lot of people actually i'm surprised how many people uh will compromise on security like i'll give you i was talking to some customer yesterday and they do uh they said how do you save password that's an excel sheet you know and excel sheet is probably the most i can tell you i know we are making like uh faces but at the same time xlc is the most commonly used password manager for probably 98 99 of the world and so what would you recommend instead use like a password manager anything like you know just google flash manager pretty much everything in the

top five six is good you know uh don't cheap out on a family plan don't cheap out on like you know those like okay man this company is telling me this thing go with a better company even if you don't go to the iphone election that's fine you know if at least have a better company like you know don't have a family plan because family plan basically make you very vulnerable to you because now just you're putting your own life on race but everyone who's in the time to plan always you know and the third part is uh don't give out your telephone number an email address everywhere you know like don't go to like you know have a different email address if you want to um and use like ubiki or google authenticator or authy or these apps like you know there's something simple

at one point of time i had statistics that 95 percent of people who are on like major exchanges do not have a 2fa i'm not talking about sms i'm talking about like general 2fa and i think 99 of those uh were using sms 2fa so the people who even had it they were using sms 2fa every day i hear stories i deal with at least two or three people who get sims up every day and they say okay man we had sms the 2fa and i can guarantee you that a lot of people listen to this podcast and they will not they'll be lazy enough not to change it you know listeners please don't please don't be those people but but i can tell you like i've stunned people and i said men do it they said okay we'll do it tomorrow man how much

time did like five minutes literally it literally takes you to download an app you know and have a sms-2fa you know if you are very cautious have a second phone number but i can tell you that how many people make this mistake over and they and it you know and in the end they lose and they still don't learn that's the worst part they will still use the same sms 2fa because they think it will not happen to them again it happens again because if it happens to once you become more you know you're at more risk of getting themselves again if they have found something and something they just do it for fun and and you know like i because obviously i'm very very biased in a way that because i deal with those customers all the time and i've been a

victim four times i feel love love oh god like you know whatever you do please please please set up a sms like remove sms and use it like app based authenticator and please get off family plan man these guys these i know you are saving like 10 20 per month but in the end you know if you cover it's like insurance you can live without insurance too you know but like you know the one day you need insurance that's when you need it yeah all right well that's great advice well thank you so much for coming on unconfirmed thank you laura for having me on the show don't forget next up is the weekly news recap stick around for this week in crypto after this short break in this crisis many investors aim to keep and grow their digital assets

others seek to maximize the yield on their cash nexa allows you to achieve both of these goals the company offers instant crypto credit lines against all major cryptocurrencies with interest rates starting from only 5.9 apr nexo also allows you to earn up to eight percent annually on your fiat and digital assets what's more interest is paid out daily and you can add or withdraw funds at any time get started at nexo dot io hi everyone thanks for tuning in to this week's news recap first headline u.s bank regulator grants bank's authority to custody crypto the office of the controller of the

currency or occ published a letter that effectively allows national banks in the us to provide cryptocurrency custody services acting controller brian brooks the former chief legal officer of coinbase who took office less than two months ago said quote this opinion clarifies that banks can continue satisfying their customers needs for safeguarding their most valuable assets which today for tens of millions of americans includes cryptocurrency the announcement marks a significant shift in the relationship between the u.s banking sector and the crypto industry as caitlyn long the founder and ceo of avanti bank and trust said in a tweet thread game on the us occ's announcement that it's following

wyoming by allowing national banks to custody digital assets is great news for crypto long overdue and it will hopefully help the us regain ground it lost to other developed world countries by dilly delling for so long the winners equal customers and crypto vcs she says this will spur an m a boom as u.s banks acquire digital asset custodians because trust company charters and the bit license are now obsolete also coindesk reports that avanti bank which long is founding will be opening its doors in october and will issue a new digital asset called avit that will likely use the bitcoin blockchain

next headline will ethereum 2.0 be easier to attack than ethereum 1.0 as ethereum moves to the proof of stake incentive model with ethereum 2.0 researchers at consensus have published a detailed review of its network economics in the author's assessment ethereum 2.0 proof of stake is highly complex relative to proof of work the security of the network in ethereum 2.0 is dependent upon three key variables the amount of eth state the price of eth and volatility attacks on ethereum 2.0 are easier to scale than on ethereum 1.0 and derivative attacks in which attackers can make money

by for instance shorting using any of the proliferating types of ether derivatives could become more common stephen cullikan from ether capital put out a thesis which says that stake teeth is more like a digital bond with no counterparty risk he writes quote steak teeth gives you yield at the protocol level and not via a counterparty steak teeth is therefore an intrinsic yield instrument for the first time ever you can compound your eath holdings organically without assuming any counterparty risk in a separate tweet ethereum creator vitalik buterin highlighted that quote transaction fee mining revenue is now nearing half as high as block reward

revenue this actually risks making ethereum less secure fee market reform for example ethereum improvement proposal e1559 fixes this another reason why that eip is important next headline china's state-backed blockchain network integrates with six public chains in a bid to dominate the blockchain infrastructure space globally china has integrated its state-backed blockchain-based service network or bsn with six public chains that include ethereum tazos neo but also disclosure tazos is a sponsor of my shows neo nervos eos and irisnet the partnership will allow developers on

these blockchains to build apps and run nodes using data storage and bandwidth from bsn's overseas data centers the networks could benefit from bsn's cost-effective services and access to chinese enterprise blockchain networks and financial data from china's union pay which is usually difficult to obtain for entities outside the country elsewhere in asia south korea has finalized its plan to charge a 20 in tax on income generated from cryptocurrency transactions for people with an annual income of more than 2.5 million one or two thousand dollars from crypto trading next headline visa and mastercard expand crypto efforts

and quite a turnabout from last year when visa and scouts of other payment companies left the libra association this week the credit card giant published a new outlook on cryptocurrencial currency payment flows and stated that the company has been advancing and evolving its digital currency strategy for quite some time visa writes quote we believe that digital currencies have the potential to extend the value of digital payments to a greater number of people and places as such we want to help shape and support the role they play in the future of money mastercard also announced quote the expansion of its cryptocurrency program making it simpler and faster for partners to bring secure compliant payment cards to market

next headline with bitcoin volatility hitting record lows traders turn to d5 folks from traditional finance usually scoff at bitcoin's volatility however over the last few weeks bitcoin's price has been stuck within a tight range with its 60-day rolling volatility hitting a 15-month low last week traders have now turned to d5 tokens while reducing exposure to large cap cryptos such as bitcoin and ethereum more than a billion dollars has been locked up in lending protocol compound fuels by yield farming traders are also capitalizing on the derivatives market and using options to generate yields in a less volatile market ftx ceo sam bankman freed put things into

perspective in a tweet thread where he analyzed the volume noting that a lot of this activity is just traders locking up lending and trading stable coins with each other being incentivized to do so by governance tokens whose values go up as the total locked value in each protocol goes up he said that this was similar to what was called trans mining or transaction fee mining which was a fad two years ago however he says that this current version is the decentralized version he asks whether this is all smoke and mirrors or a brilliant growth strategy and then tells the story of two exchanges that did engage in transmitting f coin and

bitmax both of them started off with high volumes from transmining but said that after they turned off their transmining f coin was left with nothing whereas bit max he says quote successfully combine the user base they got with an increasingly great product he concludes just because someone made a great marketing play doesn't mean there isn't substance if you want to know more about yield farming be sure to check out my recent unchained podcast episode with dan elitzer investor at ideo co-lab ventures and will price data scientists at flipside crypto crypto where we discuss this craze next headline understanding the rise of automated market makers dragonfly

capitals haseeb qarashi wrote a great analysis of the explosion in automated market makers or amms driven in part by the rise of uniswap he described an automated market maker as quote a primitive robotic market maker that is always willing to quote prices between two assets according to a simple pricing algorithm for uniswap it prices the two assets so that the number of units it holds of each asset when multiplied together is always equal to a fixed constant the way this works is that if the pool contains 50 apples and 50 bananas in one pool then the constant between them will be 2500.

so if someone comes along and wants to buy one apple the pil the pool will only have 49 apples left but since the constant has to remain at 2500 this user will need to pay with 51.02 bananas uniswap descendants such as curve and balancer are a little bit different curve uses a mixture of constant product and constant sum while balancer which has pools of more than just two tokens is defined by a multi-dimensional surface the post goes on to explain why constant function market makers will win the stable coin trading market and why uniswap has been a success but what why its dominance won't last forever qureshi's post dissects you to swap closely but for those who are interested in learning more about balancer which is

a more complex constant function market maker placeholder capital wrote a blog post on its balance or investment thesis in it they explained the possibilities with pools of more than two assets which include things like having community-governed pools surge pricing pools whose fees rise when demand is high or rollover pools that issue perpetual tokens from assets that typically expire such as bonds next headline mempool manipulation resulted in the theft of eight million dollars in makerdale collateral on black thursday a new report by block native revealed that manipulation of ethereum's mempools enabled attackers to steal 8.3 million dollars from maker dow users on black

thursday march 12th which was the day when the price of ether fell 43 within hours which triggered a whole bunch of liquidations of the collateral held on the maker dial lending platform some savvy traders took advantage of the congestion on ethereum to send in bids of zero dollars to liquidate some collateralized depositions on mega dow thus walking away with eth for free i covered what happened here with kyle simani of multi coin capital on an episode of unchained and also with antoine le calvae of coinmetrics on unconfirmed however going back to block natives research the maker down liquidations were an engineered event that took advantage of an issue involving

evicted transactions in which nodes to preserve system resources evict the transactions with the lowest fees block native writes quote when a transaction is evicted the node does not remember any details about the transaction such as the sending address or the transaction nonce therefore when a new transaction arrives with the next nonce the node may detect a non-scap and will be unable to process the new transaction impacted transactions are then placed in the unprocessable queued portion of the node's mempool these transactions become stuck regardless of their associated transaction fees that is gas prices block native discovered the use of so-called hammer

bots which waited until until their own transactions had been evicted from the mempool and then sent replacement transactions that didn't have higher gas fees but had the same or lower gas fees thus clogging the network further the post walks us through an example in which a zero bid bot on maker dial submitted a zero bid at 15 59 and 50 seconds utc with a gas price of 200 quay at this point there was a 10 minute countdown countdown clock that was triggered and during that time a keeper bot could counterbid the transaction there was a keeper bond that did counter bid within that window however

it and it did so with a gas price of 450 gway which is two and a half times the gas price of the original bid however because of a non-scap created by an earlier evicted bid the bid by the keeper bot was blocked and someone walked off with some eath that they got for nothing time for fun bits if you've been on twitter this week you might be wondering what is the deal with yfi a new governance token called yfi is all the rage amongst yield farmers yfi is the governance token for yearn dot fan finance which automatically moves traders assets in and out of different liquidity pools in search of the best yields uran's

creator andre kranier not sure how to pronounce his name writes in a blog post in further efforts to give up this control mostly because we are lazy and don't want to do it we have released yfi a completely valueless zero supply token we reiterate it has zero's financial value there is no pre-mine there is no sale you cannot buy it no it won't be on uniswap no there won't be an auction we don't have any of it that hasn't stopped it from trading as high as two thousand three hundred and seventy four dollars curve founder michael agorov told coindesk quote since yfi had no investors and all tokens are going to liquidity providers everyone became very crazy about it and it all exploded

all right well thanks for tuning in to learn more hasive and the twitter hack be sure to check out the links in the show notes of your episode don't forget you can now watch video recordings of the show on the unchained youtube channel go to youtube.com c unchained podcast and subscribe today unconfirmed is produced by me laura shin with help from anthony yoon daniel ness josh durham and the team at clk transcription thanks for listening [Music] you