Kaamel Technology to lead investigation into XLink's $10M breach

XLink strengthens security by partnering with Kaamel Technology for incident response, Ancilia for on-chain monitoring, and Cobo Global for key management.
XLink strengthens security by partnering with Kaamel Technology for incident response, Ancilia for on-chain monitoring, and Cobo Global for key management.

Bitcoin bridge XLink announced on May 20 that it is partnering with Kaamel Technology as part of its first major initiative to investigate a recent security breach.

According to a post on X, XLink has “accelerated” collaborations with Ancilia and Cobo to secure the Bitcoin bridge platform against future breaches in parallel to this partnership.

“We are pleased to announce that XLink is taking decisive actions to reinforce the security of our platform. Our first major initiative is the strategic engagement with Kaamel Technology for Incident Response.”

XLink’s partnership with cybersecurity firm Kaamel Technology aims to thoroughly investigate “the root cause” of the May 15 breach, which involved almost $10 million in user funds.

According to XLink, Kaamel Technology will conduct an “in-depth investigation” and implement measures to “eliminate vulnerabilities and prevent future breaches.” 

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As part of XLink’s major initiative, the Bitcoin bridge is expediting its partnership with Ancilia Inc. to enhance “real-time on-chain monitoring infrastructure.” Ancilia alerted XLink to the recent attack, enabling the bridge provider to take suitable mitigation actions before further funds were stolen.

Additional steps are also being taken in collaboration with Cobo, XLink's BTC custodian:

“Our partnership with @Cobo_Global , our BTC custodian, whose robust setup secured the reserve asset of aBTC, is being expanded to expedite the migration of our web3 key management to the Cobo MPC infrastructure.”

XLink explained that alongside partnerships with “Cobo, Ancilia, and Kaamel Technology,” its approach includes plans to announce additional partnerships in the future in efforts to “fortify [the] platform’s security.”  

The $10 million hack that prompted XLink’s spree of security partnership developments involved the compromise of the Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain endpoints.

The attacker withdrew around $4.3 million after acquiring private keys through a phishing scheme — but was soon foiled by a white hat hacker who recovered the stolen assets.

Bitcoin layer-2 developer Alex Labs — the creator of the XLink bridge — was also exploited on May 15, with around $13.7 million in Stacks (STX) tokens siphoned due to “compromised private keys.”

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