The Company Recently Bought By Ripple Was Attacked By Hackers
Last week, Ripple acquired Fortress Trust, which many people speculated about and concluded that Ripple made this move to mitigate regulatory oversight, as Fortress Trust is famous for its internal regulatory power. However, it has come to light that Fortress Trust suffered a hacking attack last week.
The situation was brought to light by BitGo, the platform that previously held the Fortress Trust funds. The platform's CEO, Mike Belshe, admitted that the hack did happen, but Fortress is covering it up for some reason. He also assured that his platform had nothing to do with the incident.
Belshe then retweeted a post on his X account that confirmed the theft of funds. Fortress then had to admit that at least 4 of its customers were affected by the hacking attempt. The company still maintains its position that no user funds were lost.
🚩🚩🚩Ripple (which now owns Fortress) says there was a loss of funds even though Fortress explicitly said there were no funds lost. 🚩🚩🚩https://t.co/0hQ3xXzF8R
— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) September 11, 2023
Belshe commented on Fortress' action, saying the company is trying to downplay the event. His version differs from Fortress's. He believes that the hack was carried out by a third-party system, which resulted in the hacker being able to withdraw funds from hot wallets. He unobtrusively hinted at a possible compromise of Fireblocks, the service that Fortress uses to support hot wallets. The problem was fixed, but Fortress refused to talk to the public about it, as BitGo advised it to do.
The company is now working on refunding the victims.
As mentioned above, Ripple acquired Fortress last week for several reasons. One is that Fortress holds a Nevada Trust license. It will help Ripple and its 30 subsidiaries make money transfers across the States. Given the latest incident, it remains unclear whether the regulator will soften its attitude towards Ripple as the company had hoped.
