coinfomania.com
Crypto exchange Bitmart has recently fallen victim to a major hack that was allegedly hosted via Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain blockchains, according to a report by blockchain security firm, Peckshield.
As at the time the hack was first discovered, the blockchain security firm initially only reported a transfer of over $100 million via the Ethereum blockchain.
The firm then later released a follow up report and disclosed a concurrent hack of $96 million over the Binance Smart Chain blockchain.
“Total estimated loss: ~200M (~100M on @ethereum and ~96M on @BinanceChain ). (Previously we only counted the loss on @ethereum). And here is the list of affected assets/amounts on @BinanceChain,” Peckshield tweeted.
Following the report, the hackers stole around 20 tokens including Safemoon, BSC-USD, Binance Coin (BNB), BPay and large amounts of memecoins.
Peckshield noted that the hack was a simple case of transfer-out, swap, and wash.
Bitmart CEO Confirms Hack
Peckshield’s report raised doubts among the crypto community, not until Bitmart CEO Sheldon Xia confirmed the attack via a tweet.
“We have identified a large-scale security breach related to one of our ETH hot wallets and one of our BSC hot wallets. At this moment we are still concluding the possible methods used. The hackers were able to withdraw assets of the value of approximately USD 150 millions,” he said.
Xia also noted that all withdrawals will be suspended till further in order to carry out proper investigation.
Cyber Criminals Target Cryptocurrencies
Cryptocurrency hacks have been in existence for a long time now and they appear to be unending.
As cryptocurrencies continue to surge, it has in turn drawn the attention of cyber criminals who see it as an opportunity to make money.
A few months ago, Coinfomania reported that Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Liquid Global suffered a security breach with over $80 million worth of cryptocurrencies stolen by the hackers.
In a similar event just last week, the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platform, BadgerDAO, lost over 2,000 BTC ( $120 million) to hackers, according to a report by Peckshield.
According to the report, the hack was speculated to be a front-end attack where the attackers compromised the front end of BadgerDAO website and cut off users’ transactions from there.