South Korea’s largest crypto exchange, Bithumb, has been hacked! Official Bithumb statement confirmed that “about 10:15 pm on the 29th, Bithumb detected abnormal withdrawal of the company’s cryptocurrency through Bithumb’s abnormal trading monitoring system.”

Reportedly, 3 million EOS tokens and 20 million XRP tokens have been moved out of Bithumb’s hot wallet.

Assuring the customers, Bithumb announced that “All the spilled cryptocurrency is owned by company, and all the member’s asset is under the protection of cold wallet”. Bithumb has transferred all the remaining funds from the affected hot wallet (g4ydomrxhege/new) into the cold wallet (bithumbshiny). It has also put a temporary check on the cryptocurrency deposit and withdrawal service.

Bithumb commented that the incident is an “accident involving insiders”. Intensive investigations are currently being conducted with KISA (Korea Internet & Security Agency), Cyber Police Agency and security companies.

Twitter analyst DoveyWan tracked the entire situation. The EOS had been withdrawn in multiple transactions (Total 16, first of which was a test of 1 EOS!), which is quite puzzling. The stolen EOS was then moved via the non-custodial, non-KYC exchange ChangeNow to downstream exchanges like EXMO, Huobi, Kucoin, Coinswitch etc.

It is unlikely that EOS will be able to reverse the transaction as the stolen EOS has already been converted to other cryptocurrencies.

Non-custodial Exchange Changenow.io released a statement outlining the issue and have temporarily halted XRP and EOS deposits and blacklisted malicious Addresses.

It is to be noted that this is the second time Bithumb has been hacked within a period of one year. Bithumb lost close to $30 Million worth of cryptocurrencies (a percentage of which was recovered later) in the previous hack.

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