A hacker took almost $200 million from cryptocurrency exchange Bitmart yesterday, transferring a variety of tokens from a hot wallet, including Shiba Inu Coin (SHIB), Saitama Inu, Safemoon, and Dogelon.
First spotted by blockchain security company PeckShield Inc, the hacker made off with around $100m in Ethereum-based coins, and $96m from those on Binance Smart Chain.
The hacker has since transferred their cryptocurrency around through the Tornado Cash coin mixer.
Crypto Tokens Including Shiba Inu Stolen From Bitmart
The first transfer made to the now ‘Bitmart Hacker’ address sent 893,755,205,648 SHIB - worth $32.7m on the day of transfer. After this, they followed up by transferring $28.5m in Saitama Inu, and $6.8m in Dogelon.
The hacker then swapped their Shiba Inu and other tokens for Ethereum, before making further privacy-based transactions.
Telegram screenshots appeared to show Bitmart admins first dismissing the heist as FUD. However, Bitmart founder and CEO Sheldon Xia later confirmed the breach took place on Twitter.
“We have identified a large-scale security breach related to one of our ETH hot wallets and one of our BSC hot wallets,” he said. The exchange is now “conducting a thorough security review” and are “temporarily suspending withdrawals until further notice”.
Many in the crypto world took this incident to warn holders about the risks of holding assets in exchanges. They repeated the mantra: “Not your keys, not your crypto.”
SHIB’s Price remained stable in the aftermath of the hack. It is trading at $0.00003735 - up 4.6% in the last 24 hours. Saitama Inu, meanwhile, is down 11.3% at the time of writing (via CoinGecko).
This is the latest of many crypto breaches to take place in 2021. A hacker stole $600m in a cross-chain Poly Network attack in August, for example.
Read More: Shiba Inu Community Burned Almost 2 Billion SHIB in November
[Image: Unsplash/Mockup Graphics/Arget]