South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb has reportedly suffered another hack that began on Friday affecting the hot wallets for XRP and EOS. This is a second attack that the exchange is experiencing since June 2018 when the crypto lost over 30 million in crypto assets.
Suspicious activity on the movement of funds across exchanges
Over three million which is approximately $12.5 million is said to have been stolen during the hack. The affected hot wallets were subject to scrutiny during the 2018 attack and the cold storage system remains unaffected. This is considered an attack because of suspicious activity that was noticed on social media through where funds were moved to exchanges such as Huobi, KuCoin, Changelly, CoinSwitch, and XMO.
However, over 63% of the stolen crypto funds are still in the purported attacker’s wallet. Apparently, a known EOS wallet transacted large sums of funds from the hack to ChangeNow cryptocurrency exchange in a small scale operation employed to conceal the identity of users for KYC purposes. Another asset that caught the eye of Primitive Venture founder Dovey Wan was Ripple’s XRP where the transaction spirited with 20 million coins equivalent to $6 million.
Bithumb shut deposit and withdrawal portal for maintenance
EOS authority’s Rohan confirmed the report by indicating the Bithumb exchange’s private key on hot wallets was stolen. The exchange has since contacted authorities, fellow crypto exchange trading platforms as well as higher-ups in the EOS system as they try to mitigate ripple effects to the industry.
Following the hacking, the exchange has since shuttered deposits and the withdrawal portal stating that they are looking towards providing a stable service. However, the announcement for maintenance did not imply to the hacking claims of mention EOS but the timing coincides with the hacking which shows they are related.
For most crypto exchanges such as Bitcoin, the hacked transactions are irreversible but for EOS the situation has a possibility of being amended. EOS’s Block Producers are able to reverse suspicious transactions as well as freeze the accounts involved.
