Breaking: Bithumb Trading Platform Hacked, $19 Million In Crypto Missing

Coming into our latest crypto news, the crypto exchange Bithumb tweeted that their platform might have been hacked and is currently under a temporary pause.

In a further explanation in the tweet, the exchange writes that at 10:15 but doesn’t specify the time zone, their team detected an abnormal withdrawal through their monitoring system. Bithumb noted that their team has managed to secure all of the cryptocurrencies after they detected the issue with a cold wallet and checked them by blocking the withdrawal and deposit service.

According to the information, the incident was ‘’an accident involving insiders,’’ in the updated blog post, Bithumb pointed out that the exchange made a mistake that it mainly focused on protection from the outside attacks without verifying its staff. Also, the exchange claims that the incident won’t happen again because the company is working on an improve workforce verification system.

According to the blog post, the EOS hot wallet of Bithumb started sending tokens to the attacker’s address on March 29 when the company realized that the attack is still going and it started to move the funds as quickly as possible to the cold storage wallet which is not compromised.

About $12.5 million in EOS tokens were transferred from the hot wallet and the company stated that all of the stolen funds were the ones of the exchange and that all of the users’ funds are in the cold storage. Crypto news outlet The Block Crypto, says that 20 million XRP was also stolen.

This is the second time that the exchange gets hit with in less than a year. After the first attack, the exchange was able to recover $14 million of the stolen funds and the exchange explained that it expects to recover all of the funds this time as well. Bithumb is conducting an intensive investigation along with the cyber police agency and the Korean Internet and Security Agency.

It seems like the portion of the stolen funds is being distributed to the exchange already while the other portion is moved to other addresses. Changelly posted that the exchange was able to identify and freeze about 243,000 XRP and 114,000 EOS that was reportedly the result of the attack.

A Twitter user suggested that the Bithumb hack could be related to the layoffs at the company. Bithumb reported that they are firing about 50 percent of their employees.