Report: South Korean Cryptocurrency Exchange Bithumb Hacked

By Kapil Gauhar

Today, on March 30, South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb took it to the Twitter that their cryptocurrency withdrawals and deposits have been temporarily paused for quite some time.

In an explanation mentioned in the tweet, the cryptocurrency exchange writes –

“At 10:15 on the 29th of March, we detected what we describe as abnormal withdrawals through our monitoring system.”

The exchange continues –

“We have secured all the cryptocurrency from the detection time with a cold wallet and checked them by blocking deposit and withdrawal service.”

The incident, according to the translated note, was reported to be an “accident involving insiders”, and they are conducting investigations with security firms, the cyber police agency and KISA.

A tweet from the cryptocurrency user, Dovey Wan, wrote –

“More than 3 million EOS (around $12.5 million) has been transferred at Bithumb’s cold storage level, but this is unconfirmed.”

In June 2018, Bithumb had undergone a hack of around $30 million in digital currencies. After the hack, the exchange recovered roughly $14 million of the stolen funds in the investigation.

Last week, it was reported that Bithumb is cutting up to 50% of its workforce currently. Also, it was reported that data scientists at Elementus, a blockchain infrastructure firm, have published details of recent transactions from cryptocurrency exchange CoinBene which they considered being suspect in the case, beginning with $105 million in cryptocurrency swiftly being moved out of the exchange’s hot wallet.