For the third time this month, hackers hit a crypto company and hit it hard. VulcanForged was robbed of around $135 million, with hackers stealing private keys to access 96 wallets, siphoning off 4.5 PYR, VulcanForged's native token. In crypto, compromising someone's private key is a definitive "game over," because it gives complete control over the funds held by the corresponding address on a blockchain. 

"Over 4m PYR has been stolen from users' wallets. It was premature to say this is [wallet management service] Venly's end: we simply don't know the cause," VulcanForged wrote on Discord, asking users to move funds to Metamask, a popular wallet. "All funds stolen will be replaced once we've understood what's happened...No words can do much right now, we know that."

This is the third major theft of cryptocurrency in the last few weeks. The total amount of stolen cryptocurrency in these three hacks is around $404 million. On December 2nd, it was BadgerDAO, a blockchain-based decentralized finance (DeFi) platform, which lost $119 million. Then four days later, cryptocurrency exchange BitMart got hacked, losing $150 million. 

Since the hack, VulcanForged has advised users to remove their liquidity in order to make it difficult or impossible for the attacker to cash out. The hacker has so far managed to cash out most of the tokens by trading small amounts at a time, although not without sending PYR's price into a downward spiral due to the selling pressure. On Discord, a bot message has been asking users every half hour: "Anyone that has LP in uniswap or quickswap remove it ASAP."

The company recently tweeted that it had already refunded the majority of stolen PYR, and claimed that it had "isolated" all tokens stolen on centralized exchanges. 

(All information was provided by Vice)

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