The exchange of Iranian cryptocurrencies Nobitex was pirated by around $ 90 million on Wednesday, on the surface of an almost routine exploit in an industry that already dealt with an exchange exploit of $ 223 million earlier this month.
Below the surface, it was anything but. To excavar a little deeper reveals that this was not simply an cash outlet, in fact, not an cash outlet at all, but a political message that could end up being a hammer blow for one of the main combatants in the growing conflict in the Middle East.
The computer pirates, the Pro-Israel Gonjeshke Darende activist group demonstrated their indifference to monetary gain by transferring stolen funds to a series of “vanity” wallets inaccessible with words as “terrorist”, essentially burning those tokens forever.
Politically motivated sabotage
“This seems to be an act of politically motivated sabotage instead of a financially motivated trick,” said elliptical co -founder Tom Robinson in an interview. “The use of vanity addresses seems to be motivated by wanting to send a message to Nobitex and the body of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard.”
The group, whose name Farsi means Sparrow Predator, the next day he leaked the source code of the exchange, leaving any remaining tokens on the platform vulnerable to theft.
“Avoid sanctions does not pay.” Gonjeshke Darende wrote in X along with screenshots of the “Vanity” wallets that store stolen funds.
The regime has been under sanctions for years due to international concerns about its human rights history and attempts to develop nuclear weapons. The European Union introduced sanctions in 2011 and has renewed them every year since then, even strengthening them in the meantime. The sanctions of the United States date back to 1979, to the Iran revolution.
Israel said Iran, who has promised to eliminate the Jewish state on numerous occasions over the years, was about to develop nuclear weapons. Iran says that his program is purely peaceful. Last week, immediately before the air attacks in Israel, the International Atomic Energy Agency (OIEA) had violated its non -proliferation commitments.
Gonjeshke Darande’s tweet refers to accusations about the use of Iran’s cryptocurrency to evade sanctions, echoing the concerns of Senators Elizabeth Warren and Angus King raised the former president of the United States, Joe Biden, in 2024.
Without Nobitex, Iran, a nation that is already persecuted by oil and financial sanctions, can have difficulty moving capital at a time of intense conflict. That could weaken their efforts to mobilize and launch attacks on Israel.
The truth about vanity wallets
There has been some discussion about vanity wallets. Does the group have access to filtered tokens, or have they burned forever?
There are “practically zero to the attackers who control these addresses,” said Yehor Rudytsia, a Hacken Security researcher, Coendesk.
Creating the dresser addresses with a private key to unlock them “is a computationally trivial task and could be done in micro/milliseconds,” Rudytsia said. But finding the private key of 26 characters would require up to ~ 2¹⁵² essays. “It is practically unfeasible to find the private key assigned to such a public direction.”
Which means that money is gone.
