KuCoin Company Got Hacked and Lost Around $150 Million

A large number of tokens were withdrawn from KuCoin’s hot wallets last Friday at around 19:05 UTC

KuCoin, a cryptocurrency exchange based in Singapore, made public this weekend that they were under a cyberattack when a threat actor gained access to their computers and systems and withdrew their funds. The hacker entered their network through hot wallets, which are online cryptocurrency management apps. Namely, the company spotted the hacker after he made a couple of large withdrawals from their hot wallets. Later on, they were able to track the stolen money to an Ethereum address that revealed that the loss was at least $150 million. 

KuCoin officials have pointed out that the withdrawals happened at 19:05 UTC in BTC and ETH. CEO of KuCoin, Johnny Lyu, said yesterday at 4:30 UTC that hackers or a hacker succeeded in obtaining the private keys to their new hot wallets; therefore, the company stopped using the old ones and froze all players’ withdrawals and deposits. When it comes to their cold wallets, the company stated that those were intact because they’re not online.

Additionally, Lyu said that the wallet addresses where the funds were transferred include Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Tether (USDT), Bitcoin SV (BSV), Tron (TRX), LTC, Stellar Lumens (XLM), and XRP. According to an official statement, Tether and other cryptocurrencies have banned all wallet addresses. KuCoin CEO also stated that the company:

“In contact with many major crypto exchanges such as Huobi, Binance, OKEx, BitMax, and Bybit, as well as blockchain projects, security agencies, and law enforcement to work on this. Some effective measures have been taken, and we will update with more details soon.” 

Having in mind that all major decentralized exchanges aren’t furnished with privacy measures, anything sold with the stolen tokens is going to leave traces. It’s known that the hacker sold ERC-20 tokens to obtain Ethereum (ETH), and crypto analysts aren’t afraid that the Ether token market sale is going to affect the Ether price.