Hackers attacked two wallets on BitMart and stole about $200 million in various cryptocurrencies.
On the night of December 4-5, the PeckShield service noted a number of suspicious transactions from BitMart accounts on the Ethereum network. As a result, various tokens and about $500,000 in USD Coin were withdrawn.
Later there was information about the hacking of the BSC wallet. As PeckShield and RugDoc estimated, hackers withdrew about $196 million in ERC-20, BEP-2 and BEP-20 tokens.
A few hours after the information was made public, Sheldon Xia, BitMart’s CEO, confirmed the hack. He estimated the damage at $150 million. Sheldon Xia said that the hackers managed to steal a private key. An internal investigation is underway, during which the withdrawal of funds from the site is blocked. BitMart hopes to gradually resume the deposit and withdrawal functions on December 7.
Moreover, Xia said that BitMart would use its own funding to compensate affected users.
The attackers swapped the stolen funds for ETH using the DEX aggregator called 1inch, then they routed them through the Ethereum mixer Tornado Cash. The Huobi and Shiba Inu communities have already offered to help BitMart track the stolen funds and analyze potential threats.
BitMart is based in the Cayman Islands. It is among the top 15 largest cryptocurrency exchanges. The site has a daily trading volume of about $980 million, according to Coinranking.
