Less than a year after Bithumb, one of the leading crypto exchanges in South Korea was hacked, the platform has been breached again. Earlier today Bithumb revealed that its security systems had been compromised leading the exchange to lose crypto coins worth $13 million. However, the platform has reassured its customers that their funds are safe and the coins lost belonged to the exchange.

In the statement, Bithumb noted that it had spotted an abnormal withdrawal of 3.07 million EOS tokens through its monitoring system at around 22:00 Korean time (13:00 UTC) yesterday. This forced the platform to suspend all asset withdrawals and deposits.

However, to reassure its clients, the company noted:

“All the [stolen] cryptocurrency is owned by the company, and all members’ assets are under the protection of a cold wallet.”

What is surprising is that Bithumb hasn’t found any evidence of an external exploit and this has led the exchange to suspect that it’s an inside job. Now the platform has already notified the concerned government agencies, and they are also conducting an internal investigation. Also, they are working with other exchanges with the hope of recovering the funds.

According to coinmarketcap.com, EOS is currently trading at $4.22, and this makes the total value of the coins lost to be around $13 million. The company notes that the crypto coins were withdrawn from the platform’s hot wallet (which is connected to the internet) through a series of transactions.

To ensure that there are no more funds lost, the exchange has moved the rest of the assets stored in the hot wallets to its cold wallets until it identifies the manner of the breach and all vulnerabilities are fixed.

Speaking to CoinDesk Korea, Lee Sang Sun who has been described as the only EOS arbitrator in South Korea offered insight on what could have facilitated the breach, in a statement he noted:

“Overseas exchanges such as Bitfinex manage their EOS wallets with a multisig system, but Bithumb managed it’s with a single key.”

The latest breach comes almost a year after Bithumb lost $30 million worth of crypto coins through a hack, but the exchange managed to retrieve $14 million of the lost funds.

What’s your take on this hack that has seen Bithumb lose $13 million in crypto coins almost a year after the previous one? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Share the news on;

5











5 Shares