Hackers made off with a whopping $196 million from Bitmart, which has been described as a ‘large-scale security breach’. The hackers are got away with more than 20 tokens, including safemoon, Binance coin, and Shiba Inu. The crypto trading platform, in an official platform, confirmed that the hackers withdrew about $150 million in assets. But Peckshield, blockchain security, and data analytics firm, believes the loss to be about $200 million.
Peckshield raised alarm about the hacking when it noted that one of Bitmart’s addresses showed a steady outflow of millions of dollars to another address. Reports state that the platform lost about $100 million in various cryptocurrencies on the Ethereum blockchain. It also lost $96 million on the Binance smart chain.
Sheldon Xia, Founder, Bitmart, told the media that the platform suffered a security breach from its Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain hot wallets. He said they will conduct a thorough security review. Xia added that Bitmart will suspend withdrawals until further notice. The platform also highlighted that other wallets remain secure and unharmed.
The security firm says Bitmart is unclear about the methods employed by the hackers. “But what happened after the breach was pretty straightforward. It was a classic case of transfer-out, swap, and wash,” Peckshield said. The hackers used 1inch – the decentralized exchange aggregator, to exchange the tokens for ether. Then the ether coins were deposited into Tornado Cash. This privacy mixer makes the tokens and digital coins difficult to trace.
Rick Holland, chief information security officer, Digital Shadows, told CNBC that hackers usually utilize the mix and tumbling service to throwback tracing. He explained that these services allow users to combine illicit funds with clean crypto to make a new type of cryptocurrency. These are also known as currency swaps.
