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Bitcoin price recovers after Bithumb cryptocurrency exchange hacked
The price of bitcoin recovered Wednesday after leading South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb revealed it had been hacked again following a previous hack in July 2017.
The new hack is reported by South Korean media to involve the theft of $32 million in cryptocurrency from a hot wallet with Bithumb ceasing all withdrawals and deposits following the hack. Details of how the hack took place are sketchy, but Cointelegraph reported that the primary cryptocurrency stolen may have been Ripple XRP, the third-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization behind bitcoin and Ethereum.
Police are investigating the matter and Bithumb has promised to refund customers in full for any cryptocurrency stolen, saying that “the loss will be compensated by Bithumb’s own reservoir.”
Bithumb’s last hack saw the theft of customer data, not including passwords, of about 33,000 users. The data were subsequently used in a phishing campaign that tricked users into handing over their passwords and access keys, allowing those behind the hack to steal funds from customer accounts.
Rod Soto, director of security research at JASK Inc., told SiliconANGLE that “with over $30 million lost in the latest hacking campaign against Bithumb, it’s likely the company was targeted by high-level criminals, like an organized crime group or nation-state actors, that have the knowledge and resources to carry out sophisticated and coordinated attacks. We should expect highly intelligent groups to continue to target cryptocurrency exchanges going forward, due to the level of anonymity the crypto community provides and the clear monetary benefits of successful hacks.”
The hack comes on top of the hack of Coinrail, another South Korean cryptocurrency exchange June 10. And it follows a paper that suggested cryptocurrencies were being manipulated by Bitfinex’s Tether.
All that had already driven a bear market that had seen bitcoin hit five-month lows. But following an initial dip of about $120, the price of bitcoin recovered to $6,768.94 as of midnight EDT.
Image: Bithumb
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