🏴‍☠️ Bitget hack: exchange confirms theft of nearly USD 352 million in assets

🏴‍☠️ Bitget hack: exchange confirms theft of nearly USD 352 million in assets

Withdrawals have been suspended, but deposits and trading operations remain available.

⚫️ Analyst DCF GOD flagged a new address that received 19.61 million USDT linked to Bitget and, approximately six minutes later, exchanged the funds for 7,111 ETH through UniswapX and 1inch Fusion. The speed of the transactions and the above-market execution price suggested that the address owner was attempting to convert the assets as quickly as possible. Subsequently, Bubblemaps analysts identified a series of transfers from wallets linked to Bitget to a new address. The assets included ETH, USDT, USDC, AVAX, BNB and other tokens.

⚫️ On September 24 at 18:31, Bitget's security systems detected unauthorized transfers. The exchange later officially confirmed that approximately USD 351.6 million in assets had been withdrawn. According to analysts' estimates, the attackers obtained 292.93 million XRP worth USD 157.48 million and 31,890 ETH worth USD 85.75 million, along with USDT, USDC, USDT0, XAUt, BNB, AVAX and TRX. This is an external estimate and is slightly higher than the figure reported by Bitget.

⚫️ According to the internal investigation, the private-key hack hypothesis was ruled out. The attacker gained access to a critical internal system within BitGet's wallet infrastructure, manipulated transaction data and initiated the standard authorization process. As a result, the system signed the transactions and sent the funds to addresses controlled by the attacker.

⚫️ Bitget CEO Gracy Chen suggested that North Korean hackers could have been behind the attack. The indications include IP addresses and VPN patterns similar to those previously used by North Korean actors. Analysts point to a possible connection with the Lazarus group from North Korea🇰🇵.

⚫️ Bitget reported that its cold wallets were not affected and that the losses will be covered by the User Protection Fund, whose assets exceed USD 464 million.

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