Hackers stole $ 196 million from Bitmart cryptocurrency exchange.

Bitmart confirmed the hack in its official statement on Wednesday evening, calling it “a large-scale security breach”.

CNBC cited information from blockchain security and data analytics company Peckshield that hackers stole 196 Million dollars from the Bitmart cryptocurrency exchange. In the official statement, Bitmart said that all withdrawals have been temporarily suspended until further notice and a thorough security clearance is underway.

Peckshield was the first to notice the violation on December 4th. This company pointed out that one of the addresses of Bitmart regularly in dozens of Million dollars sent to an address called “Bitmart Hacker”. Peckshield estimates Bitmart to be around 100. has lost Million dollars Different crypto value for Ethereum and 96th blockchain Million dollars differ from Binance Smart Chain currencies. The hacker carried out the incident using a combination of more than 20 tokens, including Binance Coin, Safemoon and Shiba Inu.

Bitmart is often ranked as one of the leading centralized cryptocurrency exchanges by volume, according to CoinGecko data. Reuters

Bitmart said in the statement that the affected “hot wallets” of the smart chain of Ethereum and Binance only carry a “small percentage” of the exchange’s assets. All other wallets are “secure”. Hot wallets are connected to the internet and allow owners relatively easy access to their money to spend crypto. The trade-off for convenience, however, is the possibility of exposure to bad actors.

CNBC reached out to several Bitmart employees for more information about the theft, including whether or not customer funds were specifically used in the breach, and if so, whether or not the users were given a refund. At this time, CNBC has not received a response.

Bitmart said it was unclear what method of theft the hackers used, but according to Peckshield, what happened after the breach was pretty straightforward, which is a typical “move, swap and laundering” case.

After the hackers withdrew funds from Bitmart, the hackers appear to have used a decentralized exchange aggregator called “1inch” to exchange the stolen tokens for ether. From there, the ethers are deposited into an anonymous transaction log called Tornado Cash, which makes the funds harder to track.

According to Rick Holland, director of information security at cyber threat intelligence company Digital Shadows, cyber criminals often seek mixed services or anonymity. These services allow users to combine illicit funds with essentially “clean” cryptocurrency to create a new cryptocurrency, which is where hackers turn to currency swaps. However, while blockchain technology is public, there are ways that make it difficult for investigators to pursue the ultimate goal of a transaction.

This violation is the latest in a recent wave of attacks. Last week, crypto lender Celsius Network admitted losing money to the 120 attack, but did not disclose how much. Million dollars on the decentralized financial platform BadgerDAO. August 2021, hackers stole more than 600 tokens Million dollars from the Poly Network cryptocurrency platform. But the strange thing is that shortly afterwards, the attacker returned almost all of the money.