Accused arrested twice hacked Bitfinex exchange

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A 26-year-old defendant in the alleged Karnataka Bitcoin scam has informed police that he has twice hacked the Bitfinex exchange while in the Netherlands.

The alleged hacker has been identified as Srikrishna Ramesh aka Sriki.

“Bitfinex was my first major Bitcoin exchange hack. The exchange was hacked twice, and I was the first person to do so. The second case was a simple spear-phishing attack that led to two Israeli hackers working for the military to gain access to one of the employees’ computers, which gave them access to the AWS cloud account, ”Ramesh said in his statement to police.

Explaining how he managed to hack the bitcoin exchange, he said, “I exploited a bug in the data center that gave me KVM (Kernel Based Virtual Machine) access to the server. rebooted the server in GRUB mode, reset the root password, logged in and reset the withdrawal server passwords, and routed the money via bitcoin to my bitcoin address. “

He said he made a profit of around 20,08 BTC (bitcoin).

He said: “I didn’t save anything. I spent around 1 to 3 lakh per day on average on alcohol and hotel bills. The price of bitcoin during the time of this hack was around $ 100 or $ 200, which I shared with my friend Andy from the UK. “

Ramesh also informed that he hacked the Karnataka government’s e-procurement site in 2019.

“We hacked this site in 2019 and made three separate transfers. Two of the accounts were given to me by Hemanth Mudappa for a total of ₹ 18 crore in one account and ₹ 28 crore in the other. Hemanth claimed to have collected ₹ 2 crore from an entity called Ayub, which I don’t know of. However, the CID claims that ₹ 11 crore was collected by Hemanth Mudappa, “he said.

“I initiated the second 28 crore transfer while sitting in the Himalayas. This transaction was probably reimbursed because the government apparently learned of the questionable nature of the transaction. profit; however, I enjoyed the proceeds of crime by living in 5 star hotels and enjoying a luxurious lifestyle with the proceeds from them, ”he added.

Meanwhile, former Karnataka chief minister and congressman Siddaramaiah alleged that politicians and officials were involved in a Bitcoin scam in the state. Siddaramaiah also claimed there had been an effort to cover up the alleged scam, but did not mention who the politicians were.

However, the government of Karnataka has reported a “bitcoin scam” to the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) due to the international nature of the transactions.

In particular, these allegations precede the by-elections scheduled for Karnataka in two constituencies.

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