Subscribe to stay updated
Learn Profitable Crypto Trading and receive our free resources to master automated bot 🤖 trading strategies.
(We respect your privacy.)
A History that'd Blow Your Mind!
Historically, cryptocurrencies have portrayed volatility and insecurity, but times are changing and today they are considered to be one of the most profitable investments for individuals who can afford the risk.
Crypto exchange hacks have existed since the origin of the very first crypto exchanges, and some are so prominent that they leave a dent in the crypto exchange hack history.
With that in mind, we have put together a list that includes all the small and big crypto exchange hacks that constitute crypto history. While some would make you feel sorry for the company, others are guaranteed to blow your mind!
What happens when the world’s biggest bitcoin exchange loses millions of investor dollars without any means to get it back? You guessed it — the company goes bankrupt.
As tragic as it sounds, this was the reality for Mt. Gox, then the world's largest bitcoin exchange in 2014. To put this into context, consider the fact that
Mt. Gox handled more than 70% of all bitcoin transactions in 2013.
The company had barely recovered from this hack, when it was hit again in October 2011. More than 2,600 BTC were redirected to invalid addresses in the form of a couple of dozen transactions. These bitcoins were considered lost since there was no private key associated with these transactions.
Fast forward to February 2014, the company shocked the crypto world by declaring bankruptcy. It reported that hackers had stolen more than 750,000 BTC from users, in addition to 100,000 BTC from the company totaling 850,000 BTC (nearly 7% of total bitcoin in the market at the time). Of course, it is one of the biggest crypto exchange hacks to date.
Needless to say, after this irrecoverable loss, Mt. Gox shut its doors for good. The recovery of the lost bitcoins is still underway and is reportedly being held in trust for creditors by the Tokyo government.
On the 5th of October, investors were taken aback when the then third-largest Bitcoin exchange, Bitcoin7 posted a message about a hacking intrusion that had taken place. The company noted that the hackers originated from Russia and Eastern Europe, and had attempted to hack a large number of websites before gaining access to the Bitcoin7 website.
The hackers reportedly gained access to the BTC depository as well as two backup wallets, which allowed them to steal 5,000 BTC. To recover those funds, Bitcoin7 emailed its users to share highly sensitive personal and financial information. In case you were wondering if Bitcoin7 met the same fate as Mt. Gox — it did not.
Over the years, the downfall of Bitcoinica has been attributed to different reasons, but it all started when unknown individuals hacked Linode — a web hosting service provider in March 2012. By doing this, they
stole 43,000 BTC from Bitcoinica.
You would think Bitcoinica would have emerged out of this tragedy, stronger and wiser. But yet again, a compromised email account was used by a hacker to lift nearly 18,457 BTC from the company's hot wallet.
The second hack hit the website's credibility and liquidity adversely leading to its eventual demise. Before it shut down operations, Bitcoinica started a claims process to refund all the investors who lost money as a result of the attack.
When Linode was hacked in March 2012, Bitcoinica was not the only crypto exchange hacked. Bitcoin Faucet and Slush were the other two bitcoin exchanges that were attacked, as a result of which Slush Pool was flushed out of 3,000 BTC.
Slush Pool - the very first bitcoin mining pool, did survive this incident and is still a renowned name in the world of cryptocurrency.
Slush refunded the affected investors by dipping into personal savings, as dividing the losses with the miners was certainly not an option at the time.
2012 was not a great year for a lot of Bitcoin exchanges and platforms. When Bitfloor was attacked by hackers, it was the fourth-largest crypto exchange on the US market.
In September of 2012, hackers were able to gain access to Bitfloor's secure servers, and then
into a backup of wallet keys. While Bitfloor assigned private keys for transactions, the company admitted that they also had an unencrypted backup of these keys which the hackers were then able to use for accessing 24,000 BTC.
Bitfloor did not repay the customers' funds immediately even though the company promised restitution as soon as funds became available. In the end, none of that mattered as the banks severed association with the company and the customers never recovered their lost funds.
In January 2014, Vircurex declared insolvency and attributed it to two purported hacks on its servers and sensitive information in 2013. While these hacks have never been proven or confirmed, the company announced that it had lost all its reserve funds. Subsequently, Vircurex froze all the BTC/LTC funds and continued to operate as a trading platform.
At a later stage, Vircurex crumbled as a result of the losses incurred due to the hack, as well as ”large fund withdrawals” by customers.
BitCash was a bitcoin exchange platform based in the Czech Republic. While this was a relatively small hack compared to the major ones listed here, the fact that the hackers gained access to individual accounts using a phishing attack is what makes this case interesting.
About 4,000 accounts were hacked in the attack, which also reportedly disabled the BitCash servers. The company shut down following this attack.
Just after the month after Mt. Gox's permanent fall from grace, came yet another attack on a crypto exchange.
Poloniex was attacked by hackers, and nearly 12.3% of its Bitcoin was ransacked in March 2014.
The hackers exploited a bug in the withdrawal code of the exchange and encashed the bitcoins. To instill confidence in customers, the founder of Poloniex explained how the attack happened and assured that all the affected customers will be reimbursed.
Within a few months following the attack, Poloniex repaid all of its users and claimed that it did so using the company's profits. This step went a long way in instilling faith among its users and the cryptocurrency community.
The bug in the withdrawal system resulted in a massive payday for hackers who then exploited it to withdraw 8 million Vericoin (VRC). Following this hack, the company announced that the ownership was bought by Moolah, and its infamous CEO, Alex Green a.k.a Ryan Kennedy.
What transpired after that is a matter of public record, wherein more than 3,700 BTC was stolen from the customers and never returned. Kennedy remained on run for a long time, and was subsequently arrested under rape charges. Phew, talk about sheer bad luck!
Talking about sheer bad luck, our next contender on this list endured quite a bit of it!
Of course, as is the case with tragedies, it did not quite end here. Paul Vernon, the CEO of Cryptsy was sued with a
class-action lawsuit and the exchange was placed under receivership by the US Department of Justice.
Paul Vernon was convicted of the charges as a result of a default ruling caused due to his unresponsiveness towards the authorities.
796 thought it was dealing with a customer withdrawal request, when in fact, a hacker had switched the withdrawal address with their own.
This resulted in a loss of 1,000 BTC. This hack exploited a significant vulnerability in the company servers.
Addressing the attack, the company also put out a statement declaring that the hack was a meticulously planned one, as opposed to being just another generalized attack.
796 dealt with the lost customer funds proactively considering the major shareholders promptly contributed funds for the reimbursement.
LiveChat is considered to be a modern way to stay in touch with the customers and provide 24x7 support.
Well, a few hackers leveraged LiveChat of LocalBitcoins and made a profit by stealing 17 BTC.
Although it is a relatively smaller hack compared to other hacks mentioned in this post, 17 BTC is worth $843,995.60 as of 24th August 2021.
Hackers spread malware through LiveChat of LocalBitcoins and acquired access to the accounts of the Peer-to-peer bitcoin marketplace LocalBitcoins.
CoinDesk notes that the then Vice President, currently serving as a Board Member of LocalBitcoins,
Nikolaus Kangas acknowledged this breach on the forum of LocalBitcoins.
Notice how 2015 did not start well for many crypto exchanges? Well, a simple phishing attack caused one of the most prominent crypto exchange hacks in January 2015.
Hackers sent a series of malicious emails to Bitstamp employees. Of course, one employee clicked on the link in the email and ended up compromising the entire exchange. Jeez, talk about having a bad day at work!
This led to the hackers gaining access to one of the hot wallets of Bitstamp and ended up getting access to 19,000 BTC, amounting to nearly $5 million at the time.
Fortunately, the majority of bitcoin was stored in cold storage keeping it safe from the attack. The company temporarily suspended transactions on the website as a precaution,
only to resume in January with additional security measures.
Does the name Linode sound familiar? We listed two crypto exchange hacks earlier, that took place as a result of a compromise of this web-hosting server. Another Chinese bitcoin exchange got hacked in 2014, due to an exploited vulnerability in Linode.
The company identified the intrusion and struggled to regain control of its servers. What's interesting is that the hacker did not touch the funds till much later, so it is not very clear why the company did not secure funds by then.
The result? When the hacker did start moving funds in December 2014, it led to
a loss of 3,000 BTC. While the crypto exchange shut down temporarily to investigate the attack, investors were angry with the approach taken by the company. Eventually, the lack of trust among investors led to the demise of KipCoin.
This is the case of yet another hacked crypto exchange based out of China. Very few details are known about the exact approach taken by the hackers.
The crypto world found out when BTER released a statement announcing that 7,170 BTC had been stolen from their cold storage. The company also announced a bounty for recovering the stolen BTC and temporary suspension of transactions on the exchange.
Do you know what is worse than having your crypto site hacked? Having it hacked three times in a row!
ShapeShift — a crypto and digital assets management platform, is very much thriving today, but that was not the case in 2016 when it got attacked thrice within a month. The story that unfolded turned out to be one for the ages, complete with sabotage and resurrections.
In March 2016, 315 BTC disappeared from ShapeShift's hot wallet and went to an unknown Bitcoin wallet. As a pre-profit startup, this was a major blow to Shapeshift, which started taking measures to fight back right away. During the investigation, an employee was found responsible for the theft who was then immediately terminated.
Weeks later, on April 7, 2016, ShapeShift suffered yet another blow when 97 BTC, 3,600 ETH, and 1,900 LTC were stolen from the company's hot wallet which was stored on its newly resurrected cloud infrastructure. A conversation with the suspected hacker suggested that the fired employee behind the first theft was responsible.
Then, a couple of days later, 57 BTC and 2,200 ETH were stolen from the company.
At this point, what ensued could be turned into a true-crime documentary on Netflix.
In case you are interested, you can go through this detailed report by the CEO of ShapeShift, Erik Voorhees.
The company was able to trace back all the thefts to the fired employee, who was then sued. Luckily, ShapeShift is one of the few crypto exchanges to survive such a massive hacking attempt and live to tell the tale.
Gatecoin is a well-known name in the crypto world, for being one of the first crypto exchanges to be regulated at the time. It was probably this popularity that made it a great target for hackers.
Hackers targeted the decentralized Hong Kong-based crypto exchange's hot wallets and emptied them to steal nearly
185,000 ETH and 250 BTC, which was valued at $2.5 million at the time. This loss also summed up to nearly 15% of the company's crypto assets.
Even though Gatecoin survived the hacking attack, it never fully recovered as the company started facing a lot of financial issues.
Three years after the hack, Gatecoin finally closed its doors for business after being unable to tackle the ongoing challenges.
Unfortunately, a lot of customers who lost their digital assets in the hack could never recover them.
Bitfinex was yet another Hong Kong-based crypto exchange that suffered the brunt of a malicious hack.
One of the most ironic things about Bitfinex is that it is proclaimed to be the most secure crypto exchange in the world. Until one day, it was not anymore.
The crypto exchange hack resulted in the loss of nearly 120,000 BTC, with a significant impact on customer accounts and funds.
At first, it was puzzling because the company had time and again boasted about its verification and authentication protocols — going as far as calling it revolutionary.
In the immediate aftermath, the Bitcoin prices plummeted and customers were understandably exasperated.
Unfortunately, most of the assets stolen could never be recovered.
Before it became Youbit, Yapizon was yet another Korean crypto exchange hacked by malicious actors that had a lot to gain.
It amounted to nearly 37% of the company's holdings, and thus a huge blow to the company. The company immediately docked all transactions while they investigated the attack.
Even though the funds could not be recovered, the company followed in the footsteps of peer crypto exchange Bitfinex and reimbursed the customers who incurred losses with tokens of the same value.
This South Korean crypto exchange hack is one of the biggest crypto heists of all time, considering the assets stolen and the stature of the victim. But what makes this case a unique one, is that the same crypto exchange was hacked thrice in three years.
The first hack at Bithumb that took place in July 2017, was carried out when hackers infiltrated the personal computer of an employee and accessed user information.
Nearly 32,000 customer accounts were compromised in the hack, affecting 3% of the website's total customer base. You already know what happened next — the accounts started getting drained of large amounts. This resulted in a loss of $7 million in ETH and BTC.
The bitcoin exchange was hacked again in June 2018, with XRP (Ripple) as the main target.
As a result of the attack, Bithumb lost nearly $31 million worth of XRP to hackers.
The reports suggested that a North Korean group of hackers identified as the Lazarus Group orchestrated the hack. The company promised to repay the users who lost money.
As if these two hacks were not enough, the third hack took place in March 2019. This time
nearly 3 million EOS and 20 million XRP were lost in the process.
Remember the Yapizon hack in April of the same year. The crypto exchange barely got a second chance by rebranding itself as Youbit, when it was attacked again, just months later. The hackers infiltrated the exchange's hot wallet and drained the funds.
The exact amount stolen was never shared by Youbit, but it reportedly 17% of its holdings in the attack. The company shut down the very same day.
NiceHash is a platform that allows crypto miners to rent out their hash to others. A security breach initiated by hackers ended in the compromise of the website's payment systems. Following this breach, the NiceHash bitcoin wallets were emptied, and 4,736 BTC were stolen.
NiceHash went offline for a couple of weeks but returned and announced full reimbursement to all the users who lost funds in the crypto exchange hack. The company carried out the reimbursements every month and returned nearly 60% of the funds to the affected users.
Let's face it — you have been wondering why no other Japanese crypto exchange hack after Mt. Gox has not been featured yet. We heard you!
Coincheck was one of the largest crypto exchanges operating in Japan. Hackers launched a phishing attack on the company and spread a virus that made it easier for them to steal private keys.
The insecure nature of Coincheck was exposed through this hack, as all the coins were stored in the same wallet. The company also
did not make use of smart contracts or multi-signatures for authentication, thus making it easy for hackers to empty the wallet.
The value of the stolen coins was estimated to be $500 million making it one of the biggest heists in the crypto exchange hack history.
While the crypto exchange facilitated the trading of many popular cryptocurrencies, it was one of the main platforms for trading in NANO.
In February 2018, the company announced that nearly 17 million NANO tokens were stolen, which were then valued at nearly $195 million.
This announcement came from the owner of the company, however, the other employees maintained that nothing of the sort had taken place. Suspicions soared even more considering the recent activities and policies that BitGrail had implemented.
Since the details of the attack are quite fuzzy, people remained skeptical about whether there was an actual hacking attempt, or it was just an exit scam orchestrated by the owner of the company.
Fortunately, the company assured the customers that they would get refunds one way or another.
The company said that if the lost BTC is not recovered, Coinsecure would reimburse 10% of the customers' coin holding according to the rate on the day the hack happened, and the rest of the 90% will be reimbursed in the form of INR (Indian National Rupee).
Interestingly, the company accused the Chief Strategy Officer, Dr. Amitabh Saxena of being involved in the theft of the bitcoins.
We have talked about so many hacks so far, that the next one should come as no surprise.
The only secured part of the system were the pools belonging to the founder and advisor which were made inaccessible owing to a binding contract.
Bitcoin Gold (BTG) was a major player in the cryptocurrency markets. BTG was a hard fork of the traditional bitcoin to make it decentralized. Sounds quite ironic, doesn't it?
Once the hackers had complete control of all the transactions taking place in the system, they sold the stolen
BTG worth $18 million on other exchanges in return for other cryptocurrencies.
The hackers then withdrew the amount for those cryptocurrencies quite seamlessly. Since the hackers had control of the BTG company ledgers, they simply refilled their wallets with the original BTG.
Coinrail was a relatively small crypto exchange, but it dealt with a lot of investments, making it a lucrative target for hackers. This South Korean crypto exchange hack cost the company nearly $4 million in losses.
Nearly 30% of the company's holdings were compromised, even though two-thirds of this reserve were frozen. The remaining 70% was immediately transferred to cold storage in order to protect them. To this day, the exact details of the hack and related losses and transactions are unknown.
Another Japanese crypto exchange hack that has puzzled the entire community is that of Zaif. This duly licensed exchange was operated by Tech Bureau.
On September 14, the team at Zaif noticed an unusual movement of funds, due to which the company announced the suspension of withdrawal and deposit services on the platform.
Following this, the company discovered that hackers had stolen nearly 5,966 BTC, which was valued at nearly $60 million at the time.
While Zaif filed a criminal case to pursue a detailed investigation into the hack, the effects of the hack on the company's performance. The company continues to operate even today.
One of the biggest debates that surround this hack till now is whether it was a real hack or was it just an exit scam.
In October 2018, the exchange started experiencing an unusually higher number of transactional activities. Shortly after, MapleChange announced that it had been hacked and drained of all its funds.
Nearly 913 BTC were stolen, which at the time was valued at more than $5.7 million. The company announced that it is shutting down, in the aftermath of the hack.
It was the immediate removal of all company information and assets online that made people very suspicious.
It was owned by Gerald Cotten, and he was the only designated person who could access the cold wallets of the exchange. In December 2018, Cotten went to India on his honeymoon, where he passed away. This is where the story gets bizarre.
When Cotten passed away, he took with him the passwords and details required to access the company's cold wallets. In the aftermath of this tragedy, QuadrigaCX collapsed. An investigation into the company's assets and finances revealed that out of six wallets that the exchange owned, five had been emptied around April 2018.
At this point, suspicions started creeping in that Cotten was not actually dead, and that this was an exit scam. Years later, the truth about what happened at the exchange is still unclear.
However, according to a recent update, the FBI is now investigating the matter and leading the affected users to a portal where they can obtain more information.
Initially, the company was positive that this was caused due to a technical snag, but later, it announced that there had been a security breach.
While the company did not release specific information about the losses incurred in the process, it is estimated that the company lost approximately 19,390 ETH in the hack.
Indeed, the troubles were just getting started for Cryptopia. Just a month after the first hack, the bitcoin exchange got hacked again, and 1,675 ETH were stolen.
Well, that was not it for the crypto exchange which was then put up for liquidation.
After the huge loss suffered in 2019, the hot wallet that was stolen went under the supervision of the company's liquidators.
Then, in February 2021, reports surfaced that the hot wallet was hacked again, and this time, it was drained of the cryptocurrency, XSN worth nearly $45,000.
It is quite clear that the company lacked policies for due diligence right from the start, which continued to plague their security.
Data breaches seldom lead to good conclusions. Some even say that having data stolen is worse than getting crypto stolen, due to the sheer number of people whose information gets compromised in the process.
If we consider that fact, what happened to Coinmama can be considered as one of the biggest crypto exchange hacks of all time.
Coinmama is still one of the most prominent crypto exchanges in the world with millions of active users.
So imagine the panic when in February 2019, the company announced a data breach in which nearly 450,000 user accounts were compromised.
Wait, it does get worse! Turns out this major hack was just a part of an otherwise mammoth hack that attacked several websites including travel booking, and gaming websites. As a result, more than 747 million user accounts were compromised.
However, the hackers did not use the stolen data in ways that lead to any kind of monetary loss. The company could recover by revamping its security architecture and asking its users to reset their passwords and account information to mitigate any further risks. There is a silver lining to this tragedy, after all!
Remember our earlier discussion about the hacks on Yapizon, or months later when it re-launched as Youbit?
If you are already infuriated at how the management could be this careless, we should probably tell you that this time it was an insider job.
The CEO of Youbit was still working in Coinbin and had access to private keys which he then used to siphon off funds from several user accounts.
While the exact amount that he embezzled is still unknown, this hack marked the end of the road for Coinbin, which then filed for bankruptcy.
Seems like companies only realize that something is wrong when funds start moving out of their reserves. Well, that is too late, isn't it?
Something similar happened when CoinBene, a popular crypto exchange got hacked in March 2019. Funds ‘mysteriously' started flowing out of the company's hot wallet. What was more appalling was the company's approach to it. CoinBene had already taken the exchange down for over a month, and when worried analysts started inquiring, the company assured that nothing was wrong.
While many reports estimated that over $100 million were stolen in cryptocurrency as a result of the hack, CoinBene remained unwilling to admit that anything was wrong at all, let alone explaining.
Lazarus, the North Korean group of hackers has featured quite a bit in this list for making millions off popular crypto exchanges.
They did it yet again with the Singapore-based crypto exchange, DragonEx.
This crypto exchange hack took place in March 2019 and was carried out quite brilliantly. The hackers created a legitimate-looking company and contacted DragonEx employees
through LinkedIn and Telegram messages. They then convinced the unsuspecting employees to download malware on their computers. The rest, as they say, was history!
But unlike many other crypto exchanges on this list (psst..CoinBene), DragonEx took complete responsibility for the hack, and proactively initiated police investigations to recover the lost funds. They also promptly issued refunds for the customers who lost money in the attack.
The year is 2019. When you have spent quite a bit of time in the industry, you do not expect phishing attacks to paralyze an entire company. But that is exactly what happened in the case of Binance.
A group of hackers ran a phishing scam and embedded malware in the internal systems of Binance in May 2019. When the bitcoin exchange got hacked,
hackers were able to access to 7,000 BTC, which at the time was worth $40 million. In addition to this, the hackers were also able to steal several API tokens and authentication codes.
According to Binance, the crypto exchange hack was structured to bypass the existing security checks in the company, by making it
look like all the transactions that caused the hack were taking place in independent attacks.
GateHub is one of the most significant crypto exchange hacks that have taken place in recent times. The hackers got access to encrypted keys, and compromised nearly 100 XRP wallets, as announced by the company.
As a result of the hack, nearly 80-90 customers were affected, and their funds were stolen. The funds that were withdrawn
amounted to 23,200,000 XRP, valued at $9.5 million at the time. GateHub immediately initiated an investigation into the matter.
However, by the time GateHub could even identify the exact value of the theft, the hackers already used mixer services and exchanges to launder the stolen cryptocurrencies. While GateHub did recover some of the stolen XRP, most of the funds were already lost forever.
Looks like June 2019 proved to be a successful month for hackers who were looking to make a quick buck by stealing bitcoin.
The next Singaporean-bitcoin exchange hacked to achieve this was Bitrue. In a major hack that was carried out on its hot wallet, Bitrue lost a lot of funds as well as ended up compromising user accounts. While only 90 Bitrue wallets were compromised in the process, the theft was of a much larger volume.
As a result, the company lost 9.3 million XRP and 2.5 million ADA, which at the time amounted to nearly $5 million. Even after this huge blow, the company maintained its commitment to completely repay its customers and to rebuild its security architecture from scratch.
Today, the company has recovered from the attack and functions as one of the most successful crypto exchanges in the world.
The story of BITPoint, the Japanese crypto exchange hack is a well-known one, in the world of cryptocurrencies.
In July 2019, when the company noticed a significant error in the system managing the outgoing funds, Bitpoint took proactive steps. It suspended its services immediately, but even then it was too late, as there had already been a security breach.
As a result of this breach, Bitpoint lost nearly $32 million carried out through the theft of five different cryptocurrencies. Although the company recovered some part of the stolen cryptocurrencies, most of the funds remain lost to this day. The company promised to refund most of its customers, however, BITPoint has not provided a specific timeline for it.
VinDAX is a popular crypto exchange hacked in 2019 - one of the few that survived a hack. This Vietnamese exchange is known for conducting trades of tokens most often related to blockchain projects that are not well-known.
One of the most candid truths about crypto exchange hacks is that hackers generally focus on the volume that they can steal from an exchange as opposed to gauging the type of crypto exchange.
The hack resulted in the theft of more than 23 cryptocurrencies, valued at a total of nearly half a million dollars. While the exact details following the attack are not completely clear, the company announced that it had fully recovered from the attack.
Another South Korean crypto exchange hack that every crypto enthusiast should know about is the case of Upbit. In November 2019, Upbit experienced a major breach on their systems by a group of hackers who then proceeded to steal 342,000 ETH. At that time, this was worth nearly $15 million.
Years later, it has been reported that the hackers are still moving the funds from one wallet to another, for unknown reasons. However, as of 2020, Upbit officially upgraded its security architecture after having temporarily suspended services.
When the crypto exchange got hacked, the initial announcement was that the company had lost all funds in the hack. But as the company investigated further, it was discovered that Altsbit had lost a lot of funds, but just under half of the cryptocurrencies that it was stored at the time.
Lulzsec, a famous hacking group claimed responsibility for the attack, which resulted in more than $70,000 worth of cryptocurrencies. Till today, there is not much of an explanation of how the hack was carried out. Altsbit stated that it only had enough funds to carry out partial refunds, and shut down in May 2020.
By 2020, BlockFi is just yet another major bitcoin exchange hacked by a group of hackers who wanted to wreak some havoc.
The hack basically SIM-swapped an employee of BlockFi and gained control of their email account. What's more, the hacker also got access to other email accounts in the BlockFi network and reset the passwords.
As seen in the previous case, data breaches never have good consequences. An Indian crypto exchange, called BuyUcoin, had to endure something similar.
Hackers breached sensitive data of BuyUcoin users and then dumped all the information onto the dark web. The dumps were made in three installments, and included names, emails, addresses, bank details and KYC details (government ids), and history of deposits.
Eterbase is a Slovakian crypto exchange that got hacked in 2020, and as a result, lost a lot of funds. In September 2020, Eterbase released a statement on Telegram stating that six of its hot wallets were stolen and drained of a variety of different cryptocurrencies. As a result of this malicious hack, nearly $5.4 million worth of cryptocurrency was stolen.
The majority of cryptocurrency stolen was Ether, and a formal investigation was initiated by the company. At a later stage, Eterbase tracked down the stolen funds to be traded in other rival exchanges. The company put out a formal request asking the company to freeze out the stolen funds so that the hackers can not cash out their loot easily.
On September 26, 2020, KuCoin announced that it had been hacked and stolen from in a pre-planned hacking attack.
By the time the entire hack was analyzed, the lost funds had amounted to $280 million in stolen cryptocurrencies, making the KuCoin incident, the third biggest crypto exchange hacks till now. The reports suggested that the funds were stolen out of the company's hot wallets and that its cold wallets were still safe.
The next entry on this list is a funny one, albeit a tragic one.
A Russian crypto exchange got hacked in December 2020 and lost complete control of its servers. Sounds impossible in 2020, right? But in the case of LiveCoin, this is exactly what happened. Users came to know about it when they saw this bizarre message upon visiting their website:
The attack seemed to have taken place on December 23, and the hackers not only took complete control of the LiveCoin infrastructure, but they also modified the exchange rates to reflect largely inflated and gigantic rates. The hackers then started cashing out their accounts based on these modified rates, thus making great profits.
What do you do when you are a crypto exchange with a user base of 2 million and suddenly experiences a major cyber attack? You shut it down and take care of the issue!
Hotbit went through something like that when the crypto exchange got hacked in April 2021. The company announced that their systems had been breached and a group of hackers was trying to access the wallets. However, they were unsuccessful in doing so as the threat was identified early on, and the risk control measures prevented that from happening.
The rising value of data and cryptocurrencies today means that hackers have a lot to gain by raiding crypto exchanges.
One such recent Japanese crypto exchange hack is that of Liquid According to the company, the hackers were able to steal nearly $97 million worth of cryptocurrencies during the attack. The incident came to light when the management of the company noticed that there was consistent unauthorized access to the company's wallets.
While the crypto community came together and froze out a lot of the stolen cryptocurrencies, most of them are still lost. As a result of the attack, the crypto exchange has halted all withdrawals and transactions on the platform till the issue has been thoroughly investigated and resolved.
When a crypto exchange gets hacked, it is most likely to lose out a lot of funds, or worse, go bankrupt. Right? This is what we have seen so far in all the cases that we have delved into.
But here is a unicorn that defied all possible consequences of a successful hack attempt.
PolyNetwork was targeted by a group of hackers, in what could have been one of the greatest crypto heists of all time, even surpassing Mt. Gox. The hacker was able to exploit a major vulnerability in the code of Poly Networks, which allowed them to transfer all the funds to his accounts.
The hack allowed the hacker to steal nearly $600 million worth of cryptocurrency. Then, a strange thing happened. The hacker started a dialogue with Poly Network, promising to return the stolen funds. The company understandably pleaded with the hacker to return all the funds and while he did so, a final installment of $200 million in funds was still frozen and required the hacker's private key. According to recent reports, the private keys were also shared, leading to the complete recovery of the stolen funds.
The world of cryptocurrencies is only set to grow and expand in the upcoming years, with its value skyrocketing more than ever before. This growth is likely to attract malicious hackers trying to make a quick buck, or using their skills to pull off major heists. Crypto exchanges need to follow the best practices to ensure that the customer accounts and funds are safely retained, and no vulnerabilities are exploited that can lead to catastrophic ends for the exchange.
Subscribe to our newsletter and join our Telegram channel to get the latest industry updates.
Join CoinSutra Newsletter & learn about Blockchain & Bitcoin.
Learn Profitable Crypto Trading and receive our free resources to master automated bot 🤖 trading strategies.
(We respect your privacy.)
For Crypto Investors:
Beginners Traders:
Advanced Crypto Trading Techniques:
New User Promotions:
Crypto Exchanges Guide:
Beginners Traders:
Exchanges Comparisons:
Automated Crypto Trading Guides:
Security Guide:
Wallets Resources:
CoinSutra provides general cryptocurrency and blockchain information for educational purposes only. Content on CoinSutra’s website and social media is not financial, investment, trading, or professional advice. Readers should conduct independent research and consult a licensed advisor before making investment decisions.
CoinSutra does not recommend or endorse specific cryptocurrencies, projects, platforms, products, exchanges, wallets, or other offerings. Opinions shared by CoinSutra writers are their personal views only and should not be relied upon for financial choices.
CoinSutra writers are not certified financial advisors or brokers. Cryptocurrency activities like purchasing, trading, holding, and selling have inherent risks. Readers should exercise due diligence before participating. CoinSutra and its writers are not responsible for any investment losses from acting on website or social media content. Visitors participate at their own risk.