The year started with a bang as one of the leading exchanges reported a case of cryptocurrency heist that occurred on their platform. The exchange in the spotlight here is Cryptopia, a New Zealand cryptocurrency exchange. The platform released an official statement on January 15, 2019, stating that they faced a security breach, which resulted in a significant loss.
The platform, however, has still not disclosed details pertaining to tokens that were stolen from the platform and the worth of the tokens. To add on, the announcement stated that the exchange will be under maintenance until the case of the stolen tokens has come to a conclusion. It is currently being taken care of by the New Zealand police officers and the required regulatory authorities have been informed about the incident.
Now, a research by Elementus, a next-generation bitcoin analysis company, outlines the timeframe of the heist and total tokens that were lost. The report stated that the funds were moved from the platform’s two hot wallets, one had Ethereum [ETH] and the other had ERC20 tokens, on January 13, 2019, 1:28 PM GMT.
This was followed by the disclosure of the cryptocurrencies that were stolen. The report stated that Ethereum and ERC20 tokens were worth about a whopping $16 million. It further states that this number was taking into consideration only information found on the Ethereum bitcoin.
“The funds were taken from more than 76k different wallets, none of which were smart contracts. The thieves must have gained access to not one private key, but thousands of them […] It seems Cryptopia not only lost their funds, they also lost access to all, or nearly all, of their 76k+ Ethereum wallets.”
The largest amount of cryptocurrencies that were stolen was Ethereum, Dentacoin, Oyster Pearl, Lisk ML, Centrality, Mothership, Ormeus, DAPS, Zap, and Pillar.
Additionally, according to the report, the cryptocurrencies were spread across fourteen exchange platforms. The largest amount of cryptocurrencies were sent to Bibox, an AI-enhanced, encrypted cryptocurrency exchange platform. The second in line was Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of trade volume, and the third on the line is noted to be Houbi. The report suggests that the hackers have transferred over $882,632 out of the $16 million and that the majority of the tokens are still held in two different wallets.
The two wallets that have the stolen funds are identified to be 0x9007A0421145B06a0345d55a8C0f0327f62A2224 and 0xaA923Cd02364Bb8A4c3d6F894178d2e12231655C. These wallets have an approx. of $13 million worth of cryptocurrencies. Moreover, the report concludes that there are still over 1948 Ethereum wallets and about $46k in Ethereum remain at risk.
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Published at Thu, 24 Jan 2019 07:03:44 +0000