Pseudonymous Twitter user and blockchain researcher Officer’s Notes believes he may have been a suspect in the $195 million Euler Finance hack. In a Twitter thread on April 4, the security researcher stated: “Looks like I was a suspect in this case, as usual.”
Euler’s team has denied that Officer’s Notes was a suspect, stating instead that the investigator was helpful in the investigation.
they urgently woke me up in the middle of the night and been asking for help when the attack happened… we even had a google meet call lmao
WTF Euler was this just to get my GitHub access data logs from my OpSec repo (which I did lol)…
Seems like I was a suspect in this…
– Officer’s Notes (@officer_cia) April 5, 2023
Officer’s Notes, also known as Officer_cia, is a security researcher, blogger, and auditor at blockchain security firm Pessimistic, according to the user’s Twitter bio. His blog posts appear on the official Pessimistic website and contain in-depth explanations on crypto security issues. He also maintains the Crypto Op Sec Self Guard repository on GitHub, which has privacy tools for cryptocurrency users.
In its Twitter thread, the Officer’s Notes stated that Euler’s team woke them up “in the middle of the night”, requesting access logs of the Op Sec repository, including the IP addresses of people who have visited it. Officer’s Notes agreed to the request after being told that “this data was crucial to the investigation.”
Officer’s Notes expressed remorse for disseminating this information, considering it a violation of readers’ privacy:
So if you’ve ever interacted with my repositories, I hope you’ve done so over a VPN. I have no way of knowing what will happen to that data. I’m sorry.
The blogger stated that he could have been seen as a suspect in the Euler hack case, but protested against the idea as he was too busy to commit such a crime:
“Really, if I wanted to hack the protocol, would I be in my third year of blogging and working? Please think about it. I’m glad you like my nickname, but you can’t overdo jokes like that.”
In a conversation with Cointelegraph, a Euler representative stated that Officer’s Notes was never a suspect and that the team later thanked them for their help in the case:
“The investigation asked CIA Officer for help at a time when it believed that some of its security tools were being used by the attacker to avoid detection. No one at Euler believed at any time that he had participated in the attack. He was later told appreciated the assistance provided, despite being inadvertently left off the initial communications list.”
Euler Finance fell victim to a flash loan exploit on March 13. More than $195 million worth of cryptocurrency was stolen in the attack. On March 20, the attacker attempted to enter into negotiations with Euler’s team to return the stolen funds. On March 18, they posted an apology letter on the Ethereum network saying, “I didn’t want to do it, but I messed with other people’s money, other people’s jobs, other people’s lives.” […] I’m sorry”.
The attacker returned all recoverable funds on April 4.
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