AscendEX Crypto Exchange Got Hacked, $80M Reportedly Stolen

The AscendEX crypto exchange formerly known as BitMax got hacked and reportedly, $80 million was stolen so let’s find out more in today’s Bitcoin Scam news.

Another crypto exchange fell victim to a hack and this time it was the AscendEX crypto exchange that was previously known as BitMax. The crypto exchange recently celebrated its third anniversary and confirmed that the tokens were transferred out of the hot wallet earlier today so while the company is yet to affirm the total amount stolen, the early estimations show that the funds are worth $80 million.

Estimated loss @AscendEX_Global: $77.7M in total ($60M on @ethereum $9.2M @BinanceChain $8.5M @0xPolygon). Here is the list of the transferred-out assets and their amounts on @ethereum pic.twitter.com/VC4DKOwu4f

— PeckShield Inc. (@peckshield) December 12, 2021

The company admitted to detecting an undisclosed number of tokens based on Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum, and Polygon that was transferred out of the hot wallet earlier on December 12^th. It promised that it started an investigation and that all cold wallets were not affected. Moreover, AscendEX said the users that had the funds drained that will be covered completely by the exchange. The trading platform didn’t provide specifics on which tokens were withdrawn or what’s their USD value. The blockchain security and data analytics platform PeckShield outlined the estimations later on.

The company noted that the total loss is about $78 million with more than $60 million on Ethereum, $8.5 million on Polygon, and $9.2 million on BSC which also was reported by PeckShield including a list of the transferred-out tokens. This is the second high-end hack against the exchange since the start of December. The reports showed last week that Bitmart became a victim of a security breach with $200 million being deleted in different cryptos. The trading venue suspended withdrawals and it resumed a few days later and promised to reimburse the users from the funds.

As reported, In a blog post, DeFi platform BadgerDAO Explains details of how it was exploited for $120 million and said that a phishing incident that occurred was caused by a maliciously injected snippet from Cloudflare which is an application that runs on Badger’s cloud network. The hacker used a compromised API key that was created without the knowledge or authorization of Badger engineers to inject the fraudulent code which affected a subset of the customers. The hacker stole $130 million in funds but about $9 million of that was recoverable because of the funds that were transferred by the hacker but haven’t withdrawn from Badger’s vaults.