Singapore-based virtual currency exchange, BingX, has confirmed a security breach leading to a "minor asset loss" after the company detected suspicious outflows from one of its hot wallets.
Singapore-based virtual currency exchange, BingX, has confirmed a security breach leading to a "minor asset loss" after the company detected suspicious outflows from one of its hot wallets. The early hours of September 20 saw the breach, wherein the exchange has frozen withdrawals and emergency procedures have been triggered.
Vivien Lin, chief product officer of BingX, posted: "Our technical team detected abnormal network access at around 4 am in Singapore time ". Assuming it was an attack by hackers against its hot wallet, BingX immediately kicked into action with urgent asset transfers and suspensions of withdrawals.
Lin emphasized that BingX, for security reasons, keeps only a minimum amount of cryptocurrencies in its hot wallets. As the actual amount of the loss is still in calculation, Lin assured users that the amount was "small" and wouldn't strongly impact operations.
However, estimates of the breach varied widely, with blockchain security firm PeckShield reporting it had observed suspicious outflows of more than $13.5 million from the wallets of BingX, but analytics platform Lookonchain estimating the losses were around $26 million.
In response, BingX announced the launch of an "emergency inspection" for its wallet services, adding that it expects to allow withdrawals again within 24 hours. The exchange promised to make up in full for all losses caused by the accident. Lin said user assets were safe, and the incident would not have affected the business operation of BingX.
The situation nevertheless gets backlashes from a section of the crypto community. According to Harrison Leggio, the co-founder of crypto startup g8keep, the event wasn't transparent since BingX originally described it as "wallet maintenance."
According to on-chain data from EtherScan, one such address flagged by PeckShield has been receiving millions of dollars in various tokens across different blockchains from a wallet named "BingX 15" - one of the exchange hot wallets. The wallet currently holds upwards of $9.5 million in crypto across nine blockchains from a previously observed $13.1 million.
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