In the Bybit Exchange, musked UI refers to the masked user interface of one of Bybit’s cold wallets. The term was used by Bybit CEO Ben Zhou when he disclosed that Bybit was hacked for $1.4 billion.
Here wallet users were made to believe they were signing a crypto transfer while in reality, they were signing the changed smart contract logic of the wallet. As a result, the wallet was compromised and the hackers drained the cold wallet.
The wallet that got drained was one of the cold wallets that belonged to Bybit and perhaps was used rarely, just like how cold wallets are typically used.
The Bybit Hack incident is one of the first few crypto hacks where wallet UI was changed (masked) by the hacker.
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Cold Wallet or Hot Wallet
Several blockchain explorers have shown that the hack took place from a hot wallet of Bybit. But the tweet of the Bybit CEO showed it was indeed a cold wallet that got compromised.
Cold wallets are rarely used and in the case of an exchange these deep storage cold wallets are much more sophisticated. The wallet that got hacked was a smart-contract based wallet from Safe, a provider that creates smart cold wallet and is mostly used for institutional storage.
