One of the largest Counter-Strike: Global Offensive skin trading sites in the world was hacked and potentially emptied out, with millions of dollars in CSGO skins being lost.
Fans who have watched CSGO esports for any length of time have likely seen ads for skin trading website CS.money. The site processes tens of millions of dollars worth of skins between players. But now many of those skins have gone missing.
The official CS.money Twitter account gave users and CSGO fans a play-by-play account of a massive hack. When the dust settled, $6 million worth of CSGO skins were missing and the site is putting a bounty on the proverbial head of whoever did it.
What happened to CS.money and how was it hacked?
CS.money was the victim of an enormous hack that resulted in millions of dollars worth of CSGO skins being lost. According to the site’s chief communications officer, the missing skins are worth over $6 million in total. CS.money states that 20,000 skins were lost in total.
“We estimate to have lost around $6,000,000 worth of skins from the first wave of hackers’ activity. Approximately one third of the sum was in skins belonging to our users. We will prioritize returning these and compensating the users once we have restored CS.MONEY to a fully-functioning state,” Timofey Sobolevsky said in a statement on Twitter.
According to Sobolevsky, the issue stemmed from compromised mobile authenticator files. This allowed bad actors to take control of the bots that handle all of CS.money’s transactions and maintain its inventory. Once the hackers had access to CS.money’s bots they were able to completely empty out their inventory.
Sobolevsky stated that these skins were initially moved to what he assumes to be the hacker’s accounts. After a time, the commandeered CS.money bots started inviting random CSGO players to trade and give away the skins. It’s speculated that this was meant to make the culprits harder to track.
CS.money offers $100,000 bounty to find CSGO skin hack culprit
CS.money has offered a $100,000 bounty for help finding the hackers responsible for the $6 million skin hack.
Odds are that CS.money will need help from the CSGO trading industry, because it’s unlikely that any help will be coming from Valve. Though the publisher has the ability to reverse trades and restore skins with the click of a button, victims of hacks are unlikely to get any help beyond having their account restored, unless they’re a high-rolling Chinese trader.
Traded skins are automatically put on trade lock, so the skins won’t be moving for a few days. The company thanked several other trading sites for their help in gathering information, but it will be difficult to get everything back that was stolen.
