In the latest announcement, the cryptocurrency exchange named Bitrue confirmed that it suffered a hot wallet exploit, allowing attackers to withdraw various crypto assets worth nearly $23 million. Bitrue was founded in Singapore in 2018 and is a major centralized cryptocurrency exchange.
On Friday, the firm took to Twitter to announce the news of the exploit. In the tweet, Bitrue stated that it had to temporarily suspend all withdrawals from the platform due to a “brief exploit” of its hot wallet and expects to resume withdrawals on April 18, following a set of additional security checks.
Bitrue highlighted the promptness of its executives as to how it was able to address the matter quickly, allowing the platform to prevent the further draining of funds. It added that the firm is very sincerely working on the matter and thoroughly carrying out the investigation.
According to the announcement, the affected hot wallet only accounted for less than 5% of the exchange’s overall funds and the larger proportion is safe. The firm wrote:
“The rest of our wallets continue to remain secure and have not been compromised. We are conducting a thorough security review and will update you as we make progress.”
The firm has calmed its customers and ensured full compensation to all the identified users affected by the incident. According to the announcement, the affected currencies on the exploited hot wallet include Ethereum (ETH), Shiba Inu (SHIB), Quant (QNT), Holo (HOT), and Polygon. However, this is not the first time the platform has been attacked, it has been hacked in the past as well losing nearly $5 million in Cardano due to a hot wallet hack in 2019.
As previously reported, 2022 has been anticipated to be largely in favor of crypto hackers and scammers, with huge losses throughout the year. Data suggested that the crypto industry lost $3.9 billion in the previous year. Amongst these losses, hacks were found to be the main causes, accounting for 95.6% of the total, and the rest, 4.4%, comprising fraud, scams, and rug pulls.
Data also pointed out that decentralized finance (DeFi) was the most targeted sector suffering over 80.5% in losses, whereas centralized finance (CeFi) suffered a loss of 19.5%. The losses in DeFi have been an outcome of 155 incidents and mark a 56.2% increase from the past year.