$150 Million Stolen From Singaporean Crypto-Exchange KuCoin

28 September 2020

$150 Million Stolen From Singaporean Crypto-Exchange KuCoin

Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin over the weekend announced that hackers managed to steal large amounts of cryptocurrencies from multiple hot wallets.

KuCoin is among the top five busiest trading exchanges out there, having a daily trading volume average of around $100 million, based on data from CoinGecko.

On Saturday, the exchange announced that it identified a number of large withdrawals in Bitcoin, ERC-20 and other tokens from its hot wallets, and that it launched an investigation into the matter, while suspending the deposit and withdrawal service.

“[P]art of Bitcoin, ERC-20 and other tokens in KuCoin’s hot wallets were transferred out of the exchange, which contained few parts of our total assets holdings. The assets in our cold wallets are safe and unharmed, and hot wallets have been re-deployed,” the company announced.

In an update on Sunday, the exchange announced that it located some of the wallets to which funds were transferred and that it was working with partners to block them.

“We are locating the reason for the incident, and will keep you updated once it is confirmed. Please rest assured that if any user fund is affected by this incident, it will be covered completely by KuCoin and our insurance fund,” the exchange said.

Large amounts of the stolen crypto-coins and tokens were frozen and wallets blacklisted, but more than $150 million-worth of Ethereum-based tokens were also transferred out of the KuCoin Ethereum wallets.

In a live stream on Saturday, KuCoin CEO Johnny Lyu revealed that the attackers gained access to private keys for the cryptocurrency exchange’s hot wallets.

After discovering the incident, the company immediately transferred the remaining funds to new wallets and abandoned the compromised ones.