Bitget's CEO Gracy Chen announced that preliminary investigations suggest North Korean hackers may be responsible for a significant security breach affecting the exchange. The breach involved unauthorized transfers from Bitget's hot and warm wallet infrastructure, with 19 transfers detected, while cold wallets remained secure.
The affected assets included major cryptocurrencies such as ether, XRP, and USDT. Initial estimates of the outflows were around $183 million, but Bitget clarified that these figures did not account for all affected blockchains. The attack exploited a critical backend wallet system, allowing the attacker to spoof transfer information and initiate unauthorized transactions.
Although withdrawals are currently suspended, Chen indicated that they could resume within hours or days, and assured that customer balances are intact and covered by the User Protection Fund, which has over $464 million. In a show of solidarity, Bybit's CEO Ben Zhou offered assistance to Bitget, highlighting the ongoing collaboration in the crypto community to combat such security threats