CoinEx, a crypto exchange, recently experienced abnormally large transactions to an address with no previous history whatsoever. This move inevitably led numerous security experts to believe that the exchange was hacked. As per the findings of the blockchain security platform, Cyvers Alerts, the overall losses are expected to be more than $27 million.
🚨Red Code🚨Our AI-powered model detected suspicious transactions related to @coinexcom 2 hours ago
The potentially stolen funds amount to $18.12M #Eth $8.5M #Tron and $291K in #Polygon
Possible causes: access control violations, private key leakage, rug pulling, insider job https://t.co/Wzw84azM9M pic.twitter.com/2bqHmE18Sr
— 🚨 Cyvers Alerts 🚨 (@CyversAlerts) September 12, 2023
At around 1:21 pm UTC, a known CoinEX hot wallet transferred around 4,947 ETH tokens, accounting for almost $7.9 million, to an Ethereum account. However, the receiving account had no prior history before the recent transaction.
Following the transaction, the same CoinEx wallet transferred large amounts of tokens to the same address. Almost 408,741 DAI tokens along with 2.7 million Graph tokens, and 29,159 Uniswap tokens along with countless others were transferred from the wallet.
The blockchain security firm, PeckShield, also deemed the outflow to be highly suspicious. The head of research at CryptoQuant, Julio Moreno, also described the behavior of the hot wallet as being strange as Ether reserves are now zero.
CoinEx Becomes the Latest Victim of Increased Exploits
Around 5:25 pm, CoinEx confirmed via a series of tweets that the platform was experiencing a series of suspicious withdrawals. The platform’s risk control system detected large amounts of withdrawals from several hot wallet addresses used to store CoinEx’s exchange assets.
A special investigative team was also deployed to determine what really happened. Apart from that, the exchange continued to explain that the withdrawn crypto is a mere part of its overall reserves. At the same time, users would receive 100% compensation for any loss as a result of this breach.
After a brief pause in early 2023, several crypto firms have dealt with the looming issue of exploits over these past few months. Most recent hacking incidents within the crypto space were considered to be the doing of the Lazarus Group. The group has been regarded as being the mastermind behind the most recent attacks on Atomic Wallet, Alphapo, Coinspaid, and many more.
The North Korean-based hacking group has been one of the major drivers of attacks on cryptocurrency platforms over the years. The masses believe that the funds stolen from such platforms are used to fund the hermit kingdom’s nuclear weapons program.
