(Newswire.net — April 6, 2019) –One of the popular Bitcoin exchanges, Bithumb was hacked on Saturday. This is the second time this year the hackers could penetrate into the systems of Bithumb. According to reports from Crypto magazines, Bithumb has lost anywhere between 13-20 million in this security breach.
Bithumb has temporarily paused the deposits and withdrawals. As per their tweet, their monitoring system has detected abnormal transactions on 29th March 2019 at 10:15 (the time zone was not mentioned). Millions of dollars worth of XRP was transferred from Bithumbs wallet as pert the transactions recorded in XRPSCAN. Critics opine that it’s incompetence or arrogance of Bithumb that is causing these kinds of breaches.
In their blog, they have mentioned the core reason for this breach is an accident involving insiders. Though they didn’t mention XRP or EOS, most of the crypto experts confirmed that it’s the former.
Bithumb was attacked twice in 12 months and this time it is inexcusable! They had lost cryptocurrencies worth $30 million when they were first attacked in June. According to Lee Sang Sun from CoinDesk Korea, Bitthumb uses only a single key to manage it’s EOS wallets, whereas Bitfinex and other overseas crypto exchanges manage them with multisig system. For more such information, you can visit : https://the-bitcoinrevolution.com/login.php
According to Cosine Yu, the crypto-security expert from SlowMist, Bithumb has a got a very slim chance to retrieve back the lost funds. The hacker could successfully launder the stolen XRP and EOS. He has transferred the assets to a huge number of addresses and it’s practically impossible to get them back. The hacker has implemented a clever strategy as he had not sent the assets directly to the addresses associated or owned by exchanges making it very difficult for Bithumb to get back the funds.
South Korean crypto exchanges are somehow failing to protect themselves from the exchange fraud, hacks and embezzlement. Like Bithumb, the other South Korean crypto exchange, Yobit was hacked twice in less than 12 months span. It was first hacked on April 2017 and reported the loss of $35 million. The second hack happened in December was brutal and they had to declare bankruptcy. They had repeated the same stunt again after re-emerging as Coinbin. Coinbin had to file bankruptcy within months as it could not recover the losses of $25 million.
The Korean regulators strived to strengthen the system and tried to eradicate the criminal elements with it. However, they could not instal the attitude of security-first in their exchange operators. South Korea’s security breach record is very poor and we hope that the Korean exchanges learn the lesson at least now and strengthen their security protocols.
Now, the interesting part is we have to wait and see if the Koreans give thumbs down to Bitthumb or they trust it again. It’s too late for Bithumb, but it’s better late than never. It has to gear up to electrify the security protocols and regard security as the top priority.
Few Twitter users suggested that the hack may be a result of the recent layoffs from the exchange. A couple of crypto magazines and blogs reported that Bithumb has cut down their workforce by 50%.