Bitmart hacked for $ 200 million after Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain exploitation
The crypto exchange Bitmart lost almost $ 200 million in a hot wallet compromise that was arranged over the blockchains Ethereum (ETH) and Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
The $ 200 million Bitmart hack was first revealed by Peckshield, a blockchain security and data analytics company, which originally identified a $ 100 million transfer over the Ethereum blockchain.
Further investigation by the team revealed a simultaneous hack of 96 million dollars over the crypto exchange’s BSC reserves:
Total estimated loss: ~ 200 million (~ 100 million on @ethereum and ~ 96M on @BinanceChain ). (Previously, we only counted the wallpaper @ethereum). And here is the list of affected assets / amounts on @BinanceChain pic.twitter.com/cXXApDFtd7
̵[ads1]1; PeckShield Inc. (@peckshield) December 5, 2021
The hackers got away with a mix of over 20 tokens that include altcoins such as Binance Coin (BNB), Safemoon, BSC-USD and BPay. Significant amounts of meme coins such as BabyDoge, Floki and Moonshot were also compromised in the hack.
According for Peckshield, the hack was a simple case of transfer, exchange and washing:
Bitmart CEO Sheldon Xia later confirmed the hack over Twitter as a “large-scale security breach” on ETH and BSC hot wallets:
“At the moment, we are still concluding with possible methods used. The hackers were able to extract assets worth around $ 150 million.”
3/3 We are currently temporarily suspending withdrawals until further notice. We ask for good understanding and patience in this situation. Thank you.
– Sheldon Xia (@sheldonbitmart) December 5, 2021
Related: The crypto-lending company Celsius is allegedly affected by the BadgerDAO exploitation
In what appears to be an ongoing threat to the crypto ecosystem, the cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius confirmed a $ 50 million loss in the use of the BadgerDAO decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol.
The first reports of BadgerDAO’s security breach appeared on December 2, with the protocol officially announcing that it received several exports of unauthorized withdrawals of user funds on Wednesday.
By taking preventative measures similar to Bitmart, the Badger team continued to investigate the problem and stopped all smart contracts on the protocol to avoid further losses.
