The Cayman Islands-registered cryptocurrency exchange BitMart has reported the hacking of the Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain (BSC) hot wallets. Hackers withdrew more than $150 million from the platform.
PeckShield specialists were among the first to pay attention to the attack. On the night of December 4-5, they noted a number of suspicious transactions from the platform on the Ethereum network. These transfers included tokens like Gala (GALA), The Sandbox (SAND), Decentraland (MANA), Shiba Inu (SHIB), as well as $500,000 in USD Coin (USDC).
Later, there was information about the hacking of the BSC wallet.
According to PeckShield estimates, hackers withdrew about $200 million from the platform (~$100 million in ERC-20 tokens, ~$96 million in BEP-2 and BEP-20 tokens). A similar assessment of the damage was given by the RugDoc service.
The BitMart administration initially denied the information about the hack. In the Telegram channel of the platform, users were assured that their funds were safe, and the news about the security problem was called “fake”.
A few hours later, the exchange’s founder and CEO Sheldon Xia confirmed that her wallets had been hacked. According to him, the damage from the actions of the attackers amounted to $ 150 million.
“We have discovered a massive security breach related to one of our ETH hot wallets and one BSC hot wallet. At the moment, we are still figuring out a possible attack vector. Hackers were able to withdraw assets worth about $ 150 million,” he wrote.
Xia stated that there was “a negligible percentage of BitMart’s assets” on the compromised wallets. The company is investigating the incident, the withdrawal of funds from the platform is blocked for the time of verification.