Hacked: Billions of Won Stolen From The Largest South Korean Bitcoin Exchange

According to a local South Korean newspaper, the Bithumb exchange suffered a cyber attack that resulted in the loss of billions on won from customer's accounts.

Bithumb is the largets bitcoin and Ether exchange in South Korea by volume and the fourth largest globally. They reportedly are 10% of the global bitcoin trade and have over 13,000 bitcoins worth of daily trading volume.

"The employee PC, not the head office server, was hacked. Personal information such as mobile phone and email address of some users were leaked. However, some customers were found to have been stolen from because of the disposable password used in electronic financial transactions.”
-Bithumb

The apparent hackers succeeded in grabbing over 30,000 Bithum user's personal information and the exchange claims only 3% of their users were affected.

The breach was discovered on June 29 and reported the next day to authorities.

With the personal information, hackers apparently used "voice phishing" where they would call up the victims and pose as representatives of Bithumb. Once victim has claimed that someone posed as an executive at Bithumb on the phone and told him that his account was "suspicious of a foreign hacking transaction," and instructed him to give up his One-Time Password. The hacker then gained access to his account that had an apparent worth of $10 million won, that is around $8700 USD

Bithumb Exchange made a statement that they will be compensating those that were affected and would pay up to 100,000 won per person, that is currently around $870 USD. They will compensate further damages as the exact amount that was lost is confirmed

More than 100 Bithumb complaints from customers were filed with the National Police Agency's cybercrime report center.

More details here

Image Sources:1,2

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