Altsbit Crypto Exchange Suffers Hack Attack, Lost 95% Of Funds

The Altsbit crypto exchange based in Italy was the latest to suffer a bitcoin robbery or a hack attack with its hot wallet being completely emptied by cybercriminals. In our latest crypto news, we take a closer look at what exactly happened.

Altsbit announced the news of the hack in a tweet that was published on Thursday and the announcement read:

‘’Unfortunately, we have to notify you with the fact that our exchange was hacked during the night and almost all funds from BTC, ETH, ARRR and VRSC were stolen. A small part of the funds are safe on cold wallets.’’

From the announcement, it seems that Altbits had almost all of the funds on the hot wallets despite their major vulnerability to malicious cyber intrusions. The Italian crypto exchange will provide a full report on the lost funds soon and we will be able to see exactly how big of damage the theft made. In the follow-up tweets of the exchange, however, can be seen that the hackers stole 1,066 Komodo tokens and 283,375 Verus coins. This combined the value of both stolen cryptos stands at about $27,000.

At press time, Altsbit had a 24-hour trading volume of $14.8 million with 98% of its trading activity coming from the ARRR/BTC pair which is the native token of the pirate Chain. Reacting to the news of the hack, some of the supporters of decentralized exchanges noted the vulnerabilities of the platforms that are centralized. However, centralized platforms still command the grater trading volume as the DEX services have a notoriously hard way of navigating the user interfaces.

As for the security situation with centralized crypto exchange platforms, the 2020 crypto crime reports by Chainlink show that the exchanges seem to be better equipped to deal with the hackers. Despite the increase in the number of hack attacks, the blockchain analysis firm explained that the total amount of stolen funds in the hacks declined dramatically from the previous year.

One of the important strategies that exchanges use is to limit their hot wallet holdings and this will show any inside involvement since the hackers are less sable to drain the vast crypto sums from vulnerable hot wallets. The North Korean hack group Lazarus, is suspected of being behind most of the crypto exchanges in the Asian Pacific and now it seems that it is changing its attack vectors. The group utilizes phishing malware on popular messaging platforms such as Telegram.