Bithumb believes that, unlike in past incidents, this theft was the work of rogue insiders
Major South Korea-based cryptocurrency
exchange Bithumb has announced that it was hit by a heist that
impacted its own virtual coins.
The exchange didn’t say how much was lost.
However, ZDNet
wrote that cryptocurrency insiders tracked down the outgoing transactions
from Bithumb’s wallet address, finding that some three million EOS and 20
million Ripple coins were stolen. They were worth US$13.4 million and US$6
million, respectively.
Bithumb apologized for the incident, but gave
assurances that no user funds were impacted. The exchange said that, once it
detected abnormal withdrawals, it placed all user funds into a cold wallet and
blocked all deposits and withdrawals.
Cold-storing is a method used for the
long-term storage of cryptocurrencies offline in order to reduce the likelihood
of funds being stolen.
The exchange said that the incident “involved
insiders” and admitted that it had focused only on defending itself from
external attacks while suffering from a “lack of verification of internal
staff”. This will be fixed, said Bithumb, which is also confident that it will
recover the stolen virtual coins.
Two weeks ago, it was reported that Bithumb would lay off around half of
its 310 employees.
Bithumb isn’t new to cryptocurrency heists.
In February 2017, attackers broke into the home computer of a Bithumb
employee and stole the personal details of more than 30,000 customers. The
information then acted as a springboard for phishing scams that ultimately led
to the siphoning of bitcoins worth over US$1 million. In June 2018, another
incident saw hackers steal over US$30 million worth of virtual currency
from the exchange’s customers.