According to Cointelegraph: Bitfinex CTO, Paolo Ardoino, has clarified that the purported transfer of $15 billion worth of Ripple's XRP tokens to Bitfinex on January 14 was, in reality, a failed exploit attempt. An unknown entity sought to exploit the crypto exchange using XRP's partial payments feature, a plan that was unsuccessful.
The massive transaction initially gained attention due to an alert by blockchain monitoring account, Whale Alert, which reported seeing a transaction involving half of XRP’s billion circulating supply moving from an unrecognizable wallet to Bitfinex.
However, Whale Alert later recognized certain irregularities with the Ripple node response readings, resulting in inaccuracies in its initial report, and it deleted the original post.
Ardoino took to X (formerly Twitter) to explain that Bitfinex was the target of a "Partial Payments Exploit" attack. The attacker reportedly aimed to exploit an anticipated misconfiguration in Bitfinex's software, which they thought wrongly processed partial payments.
In a partial payments exploit, the attacker banks on a company's misconfigured system that reads only the amount field in an XRP transaction, which is often set at high figures. The attacker sends a significantly smaller amount, specified in a separate transaction field, hoping to receive credit for the difference.
However, Ardoino noted the attack was thwarted as Bitfinex appropriately handled the 'delivered_amount' data field.
