Many may consider hackers to be geniuses, however, their talent can always be reciprocated and the Amber Group has just proven it.

The crypto company Announced on Twitter that he was able to replicate the $160 million Wintermute hack by reproducing the private key used to carry out the attack.

“We have replicated the recent Wintermute hack. Decrypted the algorithm to build the exploit. We were able to reproduce the private key on a MacBook M1 with 16G memory in less than 48 hours,” the firm tweeted after its own investigation into the exploit event.

Amber Group confirmed her claims by leaving a message on the chain to prove her claims. When the Wintermute protocol was hacked on September 20, CEO Evgeny Gaevoy indicated that despite the exploit, the protocol is still very solvent and can meet all its obligations to its creditors and users.

Based on information provided by the Amber Group investigation, the digital currency platform said it could also “extract the private key belonging to the custom Wintermute address and estimate the hardware and time requirements to decrypt the address generated by Profanity.”

The attempt proved successful, with Amber saying, “Problasphemy relied on a particular elliptic curve algorithm to generate large sets of public and private addresses that had certain desirable characters.” As part of Amber Group’s conclusion, the firm said that the process used to generate the addresses used to exploit Wintermute is not random and could easily be regenerated.

“We found out how Profanity splits the work across GPUs. Based on that, we can efficiently calculate the private key of any public key generated by Profanity. We precalculate a public key table, then do the reverse calculation until we find the public key in the table,” said Amber.

The replication exercise showed that hacks can be successfully investigated and proactive solutions designed to help prevent negative events like Wintermute.

Image Source: Shutterstock