Ripple’s XRP Ledger Hit By Sneaky Hacker Attack: Did Your Crypto Wallet Survive?

by

It seems the once unassailable Ripple has found itself in a rather sticky predicament, as hackers target the XRP Ledger with a delightfully devious supply chain attack. But fear not, dear reader, for this only impacts the DeFi wallets using the official xrpl.js package from the ever-trusty Node Package Manager (NPM). So if you were holding your breath hoping your investments were safe – well, maybe take a little gasp of air just in case. 😅

Now, let’s not pretend to know just how many riches were plundered in this cryptic crime. Ripple, ever the optimistic soul, assures us that the compromised packages have been duly deprecated. Interestingly, several major DeFi wallets dodged this particular bullet, leaving no reports of catastrophic theft. Phew, right? Or… is it?

The Great Security Snafu on the XRP Ledger

Ah, the plot thickens. This malfeasance was uncovered by Aikido, a rather savvy blockchain security firm, who found a few (five, to be exact) rather suspicious updates to the xrpl.js package lurking on Ripple’s NPM. How quaint. And here we were thinking NPM was the very definition of trustworthiness. Spoiler alert: it isn’t. 😏

Now, the xrpl.js package, for those unacquainted with its dazzling charm, is Ripple’s very own official software development kit, downloaded over 140,000 times a week. Well, one might say it was all going swimmingly until our malicious friends slipped a little backdoor into the mix, allowing them to swipe private keys and, you guessed it, access wallets. Lovely.

The severity of this breach isn’t lost on Ripple’s CTO, David Schwartz, who took to the interwebs to issue an official warning. And, as if we weren’t already sufficiently spooked, Mayukha Vadari, a senior software engineer at Ripple, shared some thrilling details on the matter, perhaps as a way of assuaging our fears. Or perhaps not. Who’s to say? 🤔

“The XRP Ledger itself remains untouched, but unfortunately, the malware-infested packages only affected those services that were silly enough to update to the malicious versions less than 24 hours ago. And no, GitHub is still safe. Just NPM. Well, that’s reassuring… I guess.”

— Mayukha Vadari (@msvadari) April 22, 2025

To the untrained eye, this might appear as a trifling little hiccup, since, after all, the XRP Ledger itself wasn’t directly affected (praise be!). But let’s not overlook the fact that this hack was disseminated through Ripple’s own channels, a fine display of trust gone horribly wrong. Oh, the irony. 🤡

For some context, DeFi wallets on the XRP Ledger currently hold a rather princely sum of $80 million in user deposits. Imagine, just imagine, a fraction of that getting swiped by our crafty hacker friends. A rather large theft, wouldn’t you say? 💸

And let us not forget the joys of NPM – the ever-reliable distribution system, now marred by this compromise. Oh, the possibilities for the attacker: a supply chain attack targeting developers and infrastructure rather than the poor, unsuspecting end-users. Brilliant, truly. 🙄

Once a backdoor is slipped into a popular NPM package, unsuspecting developers who blindly install or update their packages unknowingly invite malware into their very own environments. How delightfully devious!

Ripple, ever the noble champion of transparency, has confirmed that the majority of major DeFi wallets escaped unscathed. The compromised xrpl.js versions have been deprecated, and, in due course, a full postmortem analysis shall be shared. But for now, we all wait with bated breath. ⏳

One can only shudder to think of the consequences of a hack that managed to penetrate the official library used by DeFi protocols interacting with XRP. A sophisticated operation like this? Oh, the ripples it could cause. (Pun entirely intended.) 😏

Read More

2025-04-23 01:26