South Korean cryptocurrency exchange on March 30, 2019, that it recently observed “abnormal withdrawal” of crypto holdings from the company’s hot wallet, an incident its employees orchestrated the firm suspects. Notably, the company claims that all its customer’s funds are secure in cold storage wallets.
An Inside Job?
Bithumb, a South Korea-based cryptocurrency exchange that consistently ranks among the world’s largest by reported trading volume has fallen victim to a hack. The exchange on March 30, 2019, that it has blocked all withdrawals and deposits for the time being.
The exchange substantiated on its decision to abruptly block withdrawals and deposits of digital currencies stating that late on March 29, 2019, its trading monitoring system detected “abnormal withdrawal” of crypto assets from its hot wallet.
For the uninitiated, the fundamental difference between a hot wallet and a cold wallet is that the former is always connected to the Internet, while the latter is not. With that said, it’s to say that hot wallets carry a higher risk of being hacked compared to their offline counterparts.
The exchange claims that “all the spilled cryptocurrency is owned by the company, and all the [member’s customer’s assets are] under the protection of [a] cold wallet.”
This should come as a slight relief to the exchange’s customers as it seems that their assets were not compromised during the attack.
However, what stands out is that the attack was reportedly carried out by the exchange’s people. Bithumb stated in its announcement that after a thorough internal investigation of the matter, it has come to the conclusion that the incident is an “accident involving insiders.”
The exchange also took the blame for the hack, stating that it should have taken better steps in verifying its internal staff. Bithumb promised that such an incident wouldn’t repeat itself as it is developing an in-house workforce verification system.
The Magnitude of the Hack
According to the attacker’s wallet , EOS cryptocurrency worth almost $12.5 million was withdrawn from the exchange’s hot wallet. The cryptocurrency news outlet The Block that XRP worth $6.2 million also appears to be stolen.
The stolen crypto assets appear to have been sent to multiple exchanges, including (662,000 EOS), (263,000 EOS), Changelly (192,000 EOS), (140,000 EOS), and (96,000 EOS), among others. Interestingly, Changelly has already EOS and XRP deposits worth $480,000 and $76,000, respectively, which it believes were stolen from Bithumb.
Unsurprisingly, speculations have already started running wild on crypto Twitter with one user that the suspicious nature of the attack might have to do something with the recent Bithumb layoffs.
The attack becomes all the more surprising given that the same exchange was on June 20, 2018, which resulted in the loss of almost $30 million worth of digital currencies.
Of a truth, the past few days haven’t exactly been the best for crypto exchanges.
BTCManager on March 26, 2019, how Singapore-based exchange DragonEX got hacked by cyber criminals which resulted in the loss of the exchange’s as well as user’s crypto assets.
The story surrounding Bithumb hack is still developing and BTCManager will continue to provide its readers with important updates.
Published at Mon, 01 Apr 2019 06:00:14 +0000
