The South Korean Bithumb exchange house, one of the most important in the market, suffered a hack on its platform on June 19 through which $ 30 million in cryptocurrencies were subtracted.
The information was provided by the company through its Twitter account, where it announced to the public that due to the hacking all deposit and withdrawal services were suspended to guarantee security, adding that the stolen cryptocurrencies would be covered by the exchange house and assets transferred to a cold wallet, on a platform off the Internet. Hours after the announcement the following tweet was erased, without apparent reasons, and they only mention that they do not deposit on their platform while doing security checks.
[Notice for the suspension of deposit and withdrawal service]
We checked that some of cryptocurrencies valued about $ 30,000,000 was stolen. Those stolen cryptocurrencies will be covered from Bithumb and all of these assets being transferring to cold wallet.
Bithumb (@BithumbOfficial) June 20, 2018
Through the website, the company also alerted the users of the platform about the change of all the passwords, stating that they would keep them informed and that they would opportunely announce about the restart of the services.
It should be noted that just announced the hack that occurred between the night of Tuesday, June 19 and the morning of June 20 (South Korea time), the cryptocurrency market was immediately affected , with Bitcoin falling more than $ 200 dollars in the space of a few minutes. Although at the time of writing this note is at price levels that average $ 6,650.
Bithumb is one of the most important exchange houses in South Korea, where it handles the second largest market volume. Among the bitcoin exchange operators of the world is at the time of writing at number 21, with a daily volume of $ 40,563,700 in BTC / KRW exchanges and totals $ 380,764,568 in exchange for the different cryptocurrencies (last 24 hours) , according to data from CoinMarketCap.
Founded in 2013, media reports from South Korea estimate that the exchange house had by the end of 2017 reserves in cryptocurrencies of about 6.358 trillion won, the equivalent of 5.918 billion dollars. It owns more than 75% of the volume of the bitcoin market of the Asian country and around 10% of the world trade.
Besides bitcoin, it offers several of the most popular cryptocurrencies: ether, dash, ether classic, litecoin, ripple, bitcoin cash, monero, zcash, among others.
With this theft, Bithumb becomes the second South Korean digital currency operator that is the victim of a cyber attack in less than two weeks. On June 10 another exchange house in that country, Coinrail, also suffered a hack where 30% of its funds were stolen, a fact that is currently subject to an investigation process by the Korea Internet and Security Agency (KISA).
The problem of hacking is one of the issues that most affect the houses of change around the world, both centralized and decentralized, a fact that drives them to make more and more improvements in their systems.
In this sense it is worth remembering the Japanese company Coincheck, which was also the victim of cybercriminals who earlier this year violated its platform to steal 530 million dollars. Meanwhile, the South Korean Youbit Exchange in December 2017 filed for bankruptcy after receiving two cyber attacks that compromised its funds.
