South Korean’s cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb claims to have recovered around
South Korean’s cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb claims to have recovered around $14.25 million stolen from its funds. They have been able to do this in little over one week’s time since the hackers had stolen funds worth $31 million in various digital currencies. Last week, Bithumb had to suspend all their deposit and withdrawal services owing to the hack.
According to the reports, on June 20, hackers violated Bithumb’s online hot wallets stealing approximately 35 billion KRW (approx $31 million) before the exchange operator could act and transfer the remaining hot wallet assets to offline cold wallets. As of June 27th, the Seoul based company, Bithumb, claims to have recovered more than 45 percent of the stolen funds. That still leaves a 19 billion KRW (approx $17 million) still unrecovered. The recovery could happen due to the coordination and support of other cryptocurrency exchanges throughout the world.
Bithumb said, “we will continue to work to prevent further damage and recover the damage until the incident is over”. The company has reported the theft to the Korea Internet and Security Agency. The deposits and withdrawals have been kept suspended as part of the security measure.
The company disclosed in an announcement that the hackers had stolen 11 different currencies from their hot wallets. By taking the right steps, they have successfully been able to recover half of the losses. Even before the funds were recovered, Bithumb promised that it would compensate for the loss from its own reservoirs which has about $450 billion. The company issued an apology for the inconvenience caused due to the breach, adding an interest rate of 10% as part of the compensation to those affected by this.
Trading remains open, even though it has declined due to this incident and the company still ranks as the 10th largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world and second largest platform in South Korea.