ChangeNOW Comment on Bithumb Hacking Incident

A prominent crypto exchange Bithumb has had around $13m worth of EOS and $6.2m worth of XRP stolen in a hack. This is ChangeNOW's comment on the incident.

As you might already know, a prominent South Korean crypto exchange Bithumb has had around $13 million worth of EOS and $6.2 million worth of XRP stolen in a hack suspected to be an insider job.

The company confirmed in a statement on Saturday that it first spotted an “abnormal withdrawal” of the cryptocurrency through its monitoring system at 22:00 Korean time (13:00 UTC) on Friday, March 29.

Several news sources, including an amazing Twitter thread by Primitive co-founder and crypto analyst Dovey Wan, have pointed out that the stolen funds have been sent to several exchanges and exchange services, including us: a part of the funds worth more than half a million USD worth of EOS and XRP ended up on ChangeNOW.

3. EOS won’t be able to freeze this time, or it’s now too late

4. Hacker has been disposing the stolen EOS via ChangeNow, a non-custodial crypto swap platform dose not require KYC/account

5. Bithumb is the only top Korean ex operator without a commercial banking partnership pic.twitter.com/SM9Wes0BI6

— Dovey Wan ? (@DoveyWan) March 30, 2019

During that time, we had received a message from Bithumb about the ongoing hack; right thereafter, EOS and XRP deposits had been temporarily disabled on ChangeNOW as an emergency measure. All the malicious addresses received from Bithumb have been blacklisted.

During the weekend, thanks to our team’s fast and coordinated actions, we have managed to stop a solid number of EOS and XRP exchanges that the hackers tried to make through us.

The total amount of crypto that we have managed to retain from being stolen is worth about half a million US dollars!

Here’s what’s going on right now:

All stolen exchange deposits retained during the hack have been frozen and are stored on a secure cold wallet per an official request from law enforcement.

We are actively cooperating with Korean police, as well as Bithumb representatives; we have been contacted with a number of official inquiries that are currently being processed by us. Our main goal here is to return all stolen funds to their rightful owners.

The exchange and other participants of the investigation have received timely and unwavering support from ChangeNOW; we are ready to do whatever it takes to make the crypto space a safer space for everyone in it.

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