Crypto Global

BitMart was hacked

Dec 8, 2021

BitMart is one of the largest crypto exchanges in Asia with a total of five million users. This exchange was hacked last week.

Hackers were able to drain $196 million of crypto by stealing a private key that opened two hot wallets, BitMart CEO Sheldon Xia tweeted on Monday. BitMart added in a statement that all withdrawals had been temporarily suspended until further notice and said a thorough security review was underway. The blockchain security and data analytics firm PeckShield first noticed the steady outflow of tens of millions of dollars to an address.

To be specific, one of their hot wallets was hacked and the ones that were mainly affected were Shiba Inu SHIB, Binance Coin (BNB), BabyDoge, Saitama (SAITAMA), Dogelon Mars (ELON), Crypto.com (CRPTO: CRO), Decentraland (MANA), and Akita Inu (CRYPTO: AKITA). The hackers first took 893,755,205,648 SHIB, that was worth $32.7 million on the day of the transfer. They then followed up by transferring $28.5 million in Saitama Inu and $6.8 million in Dogelon.

BitMart says it's still unclear what possible methods the hackers used, but what happened after the breach was pretty straightforward. According to the security company Peckshield, it was a classic case of “transfer-out, swap, and wash”. The hack went as follows: The person sent two transactions via BitMart and this transaction of 100 million was laundered over 1inch, and finally passed on to Tonnato. The hacker has anonymized the history so that it remains undetected. This is a completely normal process that all hackers undertake. Either through Monero or in some other way so that tracking can no longer be guaranteed. PeckShield could see this.

Sheldon Xia, CEO of Bitmart Exchange, tweeted the following to address the issue: “We have detected a large-scale security breach involving one of our ETH hot wallets and one of our BSC hot wallets. At the moment we are still finalizing the possible methods. The CEO continued: "The affected ETH Hot Wallet and BSC Hot Wallet carries a small percentage of the assets on BitMart and all of our other wallets are safe and intact. We are now doing a thorough security review and will post updates as we make progress. "

As a result, hundreds of cryptocurrencies suffered a massive drop in prices. Many investors panicked and sold their coins, causing further bleeding in the global crypto market.

This latest injury comes amid a wave of new hacks. Last week, crypto lender Celsius Network admitted it had lost funds to the $120 million hack of the decentralized financial platform BadgerDAO. And in August, a hacker stole more than $ 600 million worth of tokens from the Poly Network cryptocurrency platform. In a strange twist, the attacker then returned almost all of the money.