VeChain Foundation Hacked, $6.5 Million in VET Stolen

Hackers make off with millions off the back of "internal misconduct."

The VeChain Foundation was hacked for 1.1 billion VET tokens worth $6.5 million. Internal misconduct is likely the cause.

Today, at 12:27 a.m. GMT, VeChain’s buyback address was compromised. The security breach was likely caused by misconduct from inside the foundation’s finance team, stated the report. Information from the foundation purports that the wallet was created without obeying the organization’s internal procedures, and it was missed by their auditing team due to human error.

“We would like to emphasize that the incident is in no way related to the effectiveness of the actual Standard Procedure or VeChain’s hardware wallet solutions,” said the foundation.

In the VeChain Foundation’s September 2019 financial report, the organization disclosed that it controlled 27.3% of the total token supply, or 23.7 billion VET. The hack represents a loss of over 4.6% of the foundation’s treasury and accounts for 1.3% of VeChain’s total supply.

The VeChain Foundation reported the incident to law enforcement in Singapore, its place of incorporation, and to “all exchanges.” In particular, exchanges that had stolen funds sent to them were instructed to blacklist the hacker’s addresses.

Crypto Briefing reached out to VeChain for comment and has yet to receive a response.

To mitigate the damage of the hack, the foundation brought on Hacken, a cybersecurity consultancy with a specialization in crypto. Vechainstats.com was also enlisted to help monitor and contain the situation. At press time, VeChain was down 6.2% on the news.