Japanese cryptocurrency exchange DMM Bitcoin announced on Friday (31st) that it detected an unauthorized leak of bitcoins in its platform wallet. The amount of illegally leaked bitcoins is 4502.9 BTC, worth about 48.2 billion Japanese yen (approximately 308 million US dollars).
DMM Bitcoin stated in the announcement that it is still investigating the details of this loss and has taken measures to prevent unauthorized leaks. To ensure additional security, some trading and withdrawal functions on the platform will be restricted.
DMM Bitcoin also stated that all bitcoin deposits of its customers will be fully guaranteed, “because we will obtain funds equivalent to the leaked BTC with the support of our group companies”. DMM Bitcoin’s parent company is the Japanese e-commerce group DMM Group.
Data from blockchain security company Beosin shows that hackers have dispersed the stolen bitcoins from DMM Bitcoin to 10 addresses. Its tracker will continue to monitor the flow of funds. The blockchain intelligence platform Arkham has announced the establishment of a special bounty for this incident to identify the hackers.
Beosin believes that hackers may have used two possible attack methods. The first is a traditional exchange attack: DMM Bitcoin’s signature service was attacked or the multi-signature private key was leaked, and then the attacker used similar historical transfer addresses to receive funds in order to avoid monitoring and detection. Another possible reason for the hack is that the wallet controller of the exchange fell victim to address deception, which means that only the first 5 and last 2 letters of the receiving address were checked during the transfer, resulting in the funds being mistakenly transferred to the hacker’s address.
Source: Beosin Alert
