Cyber attacks targeting cryptocurrency exchanges have been occurring for a while now, with the collapse of Mt.Gox in 2014 being perhaps the most notorious example. Prominent exchanges such as Bitstamp, Bitfinex and Coincheck have also been successfully hacked in the past, with Coincheck losing more than $500 million worth of their customers’ funds earlier this year.
Yesterday, another successful hack was added to the list when Coinrail, a relatively small South Korean cryptocurrency exchange, suffered a security breach that resulted in stolen funds. For now, it is unclear exactly how much the thieves got away with, but the Pundi X team says 2,619,542,080 NPXS (about $14.66 million at the time of writing) were withdrawn from the exchange in an unauthorized transaction. The amount represents a significant amount of all NPXS tokens in circulation, which prompted the team to respond:
“Since the amount of NPXS token is equal to 3% of our current supply, which could potentially affect the interests of all parties, we instigated an emergency security protocol to halt ALL the NPXS transactions at 11:16 am Singapore time (GMT+8) to protect NPXS holders and help Coinrail and Korean law enforcement to investigate the incident.”Apparently, the hacker(s) transferred the funds to IDEX, but the exchange collaborated with Coinrail and Pundi X and froze the account which deposited the tokens. South Korean authorities are already on the case, and we hope that the attackers will not be able to profit from the crypto assets they have stolen.
The attackers also stole an unknown amount of other tokens from the exchange, but details are still unclear with some news outlets reporting that about $40 million worth of tokens were stolen.
A number of observers blamed this security breach for yesterday’s heavy price drops, but this seems a bit far-fetched. Coinrail was not even among the top 50 exchanges by volume prior to the hack, and processed about $2 million worth on the day before it was hacked. The biggest cryptocurrency exchange at the moment, OKEx, handled $1.7 billion worth of trades in the last 24 hours.
As always, you should be aware that holding your cryptocurrency on exchanges is risky, since they are a very attractive target for hackers. To be as safe as possible, you should consider withdrawing the assets you are not planning to trade in the short term.
Ref:
https://coincodex.com/article/1853/coinrail-suffers-security-breach-reportedly-loses-40-million-worth-of-crypto/