The latest hack of a centralized exchange has hit Bitmart, which lost $196 million in various cryptocurrencies. The latest centralized exchange hack may be the most devastating to date.
The alleged hack was first reported in a tweet by security firm Peckshield on Saturday night. Bitmart’s address was showing steady outflows of token balances, some worth tens of millions of dollars, to what Etherscan calls “Bitmart Hacker”. As a result, Peckshield estimates that the losses on the Ethereum chain will total $100 million, and the losses on the Binance Smart Blockchain will total $96 million. Initial reports of the hack were dismissed as “fake news” in Bitmart’s official Telegram channel, which is a Telegram channel run by representatives of the exchange.
Interesting from @BitMartExchange …😳😳😳 🙏🙏🙏 https://t.co/dFrzSww0fs pic.twitter.com/GuDB7bt2eC
— PeckShield Inc. (@peckshield) December 5, 2021
Sheldon Xia, CEO and founder of the company, tweeted to confirm the incident a few hours later:
1/3 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.
— Sheldon Xia (@sheldonbitmart) December 5, 2021
A large number of outbound transfers was first noticed at 7.30 PM UTC by PeckShield. The search found that tokens including meme tokens like Shiba (SHIB) as well as half a million dollars in the stablecoin USDC had been sent out of BitMart’s hot wallet starting at 4.30 PM EST.
According to Xia, the exchange is conducting a thorough security review and withdrawals will be suspended until further notice. By using 1inch the hacker exchanged the stolen assets for ETH, and deposited ETH into Tornado Cash making it nearly impossible to trace the funds.
