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Crypto Exchange Hacks - How Secure Are Crypto Exchanges?

Upbits, Cryptopia, Binance. Some crypto exchange hacks have been announced this year.

During the year 2019, several crypto exchanges were infiltrated worldwide, stealing millions of dollars worth of digital assets. However, as a survey by Binance Research revealed, 92% of investors still keep their cryptos on exchange wallets of the crypto exchanges. A surprising number, if you look at the crypto exchange hacks this year alone.

First, it caught the New Zealand cryptocurrency exchange Cryptopia. On January 14, the company announced an emergency maintenance. The next day, the website of the stock exchange went offline with the blog and support pages. Cryptopia subsequently announced that it had suffered significant losses through a security breach. According to data analyst Elementus, the loss of ERC 20 and Ethereum tokens was estimated at $ 16 million. In addition, the hacker had stolen the private keys of Cryptopia and was able to withdraw another 1,675 ETH.

Two other crypto currency exchanges lost funds in March. Singaporean DragonEX reported on the official telegram channel that the crypto-exchange was compromised and $ 7 million worth of assets had disappeared. The South Korean Bithumb Exchange issued a statement in the same month that an abnormal and unauthorized withdrawal resulted in a loss of $ 13 million. The company suspected that this was an insider job and took full responsibility for the lost funds.

Even Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, similarly experienced a security breach worth around $ 40 million. It was about 7,000 BTC and according to Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, the hack stole about 2 percent of the BTC holdings on this crypto exchange. However, no user funds were affected and this incident is fully covered by SAFU funds.

Singapore-based Bitrue announced on June 27 in a series of tweets that the "risk control protocol" was exploited through vulnerabilities that allowed cybercriminals to access nearly $ 5 million in personal funds. It affected the crypto assets of about 90 Bitrue users from the hack.

A little later, the Japanese BITPoint lost $ 28 million in an attack, directly affecting over 50,000 users. According to BITPoint CEO Genki Oda, 5,108 LTC, 11,169 ETH, 1,225 BTC and 1,985 BCH were stolen. The company promised all users to refund their cryptos.

The biggest known crypto poll of the year took place last week in South Korea. UPbit, one of the largest crypto currency exchanges in South Korea, announced that 342,000 ETH were transferred from the hot wallet of the stock exchange to an unknown wallet. The loss is worth $ 51 million. The company behind UPbit, however, insures to cover all losses with enterprise values.

These cases are again impressive, crypto exchanges offer repeatedly attack surfaces for hackers and scammers. Even if the stock markets fail to sleep in terms of security and to constantly increase and optimize their security measures, there remains a race. Therefore, it is always recommended not to store crypto-balances on wallets at stock exchanges, but to use hardware wallets such as Ledger or Trezor. In the context of crypto exchange hacks surprised the result of a Binance survey. There, more than 90% of the surveyed investors stated that they were storing their wallet balances on stock exchanges.

 

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