Cyberattack on Crypto exchange Bitmart: $196 million taken

Hackers stole $196 million from the Crypto trading platform Bitmart on Saturday.

Bitmart confirmed the hacking in an official announcement later on Saturday night. The company called this a large-scale security breach and wrote that hackers extracted approximately $150 million in assets.

Later, blockchain security and data analysis company Peckshield estimated the loss to be almost 200 million U.S. dollars.

Bitmart added in the announcement that they suspended all withdrawals until further notice. According to them, the company is going through a security review.

Peckshield estimates that Bitmart lost about 100 million U.S. dollars of various cryptocurrencies on the Ethereum blockchain and 96 million on Binance Smart Chain. The hackers mixed over 20 tokens, including Binance Coin, safemoon, and Shiba Inu.

Bitmart exchange provides spot trading, leveraged futures trading, lending, and mortgage services. It is usually one of the centralized crypto exchanges with the largest trading volume.

After transferring funds from Bitmart, the hacker used a decentralized transaction aggregator called “1inch” to exchange the stolen tokens for ether.

From there, the ether is deposited into a privacy mixer called Tornado Cash. Tornado Cash makes the assets more difficult to track.

So, even though the blockchain is public, there are still ways to make it difficult for investigators to track the final destination of the transaction.

This latest vulnerability occurred in the newest wave of hacking attacks.

Last week, the cryptocurrency lender Celsius Network admitted to losing funds due to a $120 million hack attack on the decentralized financial platform BadgerDAO.

In August, a hacker stole more than $600 million worth of tokens from the cryptocurrency platform Poly Network. Curiously, the attackers then refunded almost all of the money.

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