BitMart, a cryptocurrency trading platform, has disclosed that rogue hackers have stolen roughly $150 million in funds. Following a cyberattack on the platform on Saturday (December 4), blockchain security firm Peckshield has assessed damages of about $200 million, including $100 million on the Ethereum blockchain and $96 million on the Binance Smart Chain.
BitMart released a statement on the same day saying that it was “temporarily suspending withdrawals until further notice” after a breach that focused on two ‘hot’ wallets (meaning the wallets were connected to the internet).
“We have identified a large-scale security breach related to one of our ETH hot wallets and one of our BSC hot wallets today. At this moment we are still concluding the possible methods used. Hackers were able to withdraw assets of the value of approximately 150 million USD,” read the alert.
BitMart stated that the Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain wallets accounted for “a small percentage of assets on BitMart” and that “all of our other wallets are secure and unharmed. We are now conducting a thorough security review and we will post updates as we progress.”
While BitMart indicated it was still looking into how the cyber-heist was carried out, Peckshield characterized the breach on December 5 as “pretty straightforward: transfer-out, swap, and wash.” The usage of a decentralized exchange aggregator and privacy mixer to make the stolen monies harder to track was shown on Twitter using a flow chart.
The crime eclipses the $120 million in cash taken from users of the decentralized finance network BadgerDAO last week, and more than $55 million suspected to have been stolen from the wallets of workers and customers of the decentralized finance platform bZx the previous month.
Meanwhile, in October, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase said that at least 6,000 customers’ accounts had been hacked, resulting in the loss of an unknown sum of money.
