A considerably large amount of tokens were withdrawn from KuCoin's hot wallets last Friday at around 19:05 UTC
This weekend Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin announced that it had a mega hack saying how a threat actor entered its systems and emptied its funds. The hacker did so through what are known as hot wallets which are essentially cryptocurrency management apps that are online. The company revealed that they detected the hacker after some particularly big withdrawals from its hot wallets. Users tracked some of the stolen funds to an Etherium address which shows that the loss is currently estimated at a minimal of $150 million.
KuCoin said that the withdrawals were of Bitcoin (BTC) Ethereum (ETH) tokens, initiating at around 19:05 UTC time. Yesterday at 4:30 UTC time, KuCoin CEO Johnny Lyu said that the hacker or hackers managed to get their hands on the private keys to the exchange's new hot wallets, whilst he abandoned the old ones and then froze customer deposits and withdrawals. The company’s cold wallets were naturally not touched since they are not online.
Lyu also mentioned how the wallet addresses where the stolen funds were transferred included Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), bitcoin SV (BSV), LTC, XRP, Stellar Lumens (XLM), Tron (TRX) and Tether (USDT). Tether along with other several cryptocurrencies have banned the wallet addresses according to a recent statement. Lyu also added how the company is
“In contact with many major crypto exchanges such as Huobi, Binance, OKEx, BitMax, and Bybit, as well as blockchain projects, security agencies, and law enforcement to work on this. Some effective measures have been taken, and we will update with more details soon.”
Due to the fact that existing major decentralized exchanges are not equipped with privacy solutions, anything sold of the stolen tokens will leave traces. It is already reported that the hacker sold ERC-20 tokens to get ETH, and so many analysts are not concerned that the movement and market sale of Ether tokens will place pressure on Ether price.