Upbit recently lost a huge chunk of ether in a single transaction. Upbit is a cryptocurrency exchange that has so many people on its bandwagon and this came as a major blow. This is probably the reason why a lot of individuals are sceptical about cryptocurrencies. While cryptocurrencies have the potential to make profits for individuals and companies, it is risky. This is because they are not stable and so, may fall at any time. The recent incident with Upbit is one of the many examples of how things can change at any minute.
Upbit is a Korean cryptocurrency exchange that has been doing quite well. However, a few days ago, a hacker managed to bypass the system and steal 342,000 ether. This 342,000 ether was worth $49 million at the time. For those that have no idea, ether is the currency of Etherium.
Lee Seok-woo, who is the CEO of Upbit’s parent company, made a statement after the theft took place. The news about the theft of ether was broken in a blog post by the company. In the blog post, it was stated that an unknown hacker had managed to transfer the ether to his own wallet. The incident happened on the 27th of November at around 1pm.
After the theft had happened, Upbit reacted by stopping all deposits, as well as all withdrawals for the next coming two weeks, from the day of the theft.
Upbit said that its users did not have to worry because, according to the blog post, the company will cover all of the damages. This, they said, was to be achieved by using its own assets.
For those that are interested in seeing how the said hacker managed to move such a large amount of money, and in the process, paid a very low fee of just $3, the actual transaction can actually be found online.
Four days after the incident happened, people could see some suspicious transactions that were coming out of Upbit. This was originally noted by CoinDesk. However, Upbit had an explanation for that. Lee Seok-woo mentioned in a blog post that the “suspicious transactions” were due to the fact that the company was moving funds from one of its wallets, to another.
It really seems like cryptocurrency exchange thefts are commonplace. In fact, there have been so many incidents that have been recorded. Sometime early this year, some hackers managed to steal crypto from another crypto currency, Binance, worth a whopping $40 million. After that, another theft was recorded. This time, it was Bitpoint that was attacked and the company lost a total of$32 million. Sometime after the Bitpoint theft, Bitrue lost $4,2 million to hackers.
CipherTrace, which is a cryptocurrency intelligence company, said that by July of 2019, a total of about $4.2 billion had been lost to hackers.
Following the recent news, prices of all major cryptocurrencies have fallen sharply. This has seen Bitcoin dropping down by 2.74% and Etherium losing 2.16%. This was reported by CoinMarketCap.
