EXMO now says it lost 6% of total assets in recent breach
Cryptocurrency exchange EXMO has upgraded its loss to 6% of total assets following Monday’s breach
The UK-based cryptocurrency exchange EXMO provided an update on the latest hack that had forced it to suspend withdrawals. According to the digital assets trading platform, the hackers stole nearly 6% of its total assets, and they even had access to some of its private keys. The platform intends to enable withdrawals and deposits from tomorrow onwards.
EXMO made this known in a blog post yesterday. “Compromised due to the hack amount makes up around 6% of the company’s total assets. We don’t believe it could somehow affect a going concern basis for EXMO”, the exchange wrote.
This update came soon after EXMO had initially estimated a loss of 5% of its total assets. The cryptocurrency exchange stated that after analysing the affected servers’ logs, it believes the attacker had access to some of its private keys.
EXMO tracking the attacker’s address, set to reopen withdrawals
EXMO revealed it recorded losses in six cryptocurrencies out of the 57 supported coins. The affected cryptocurrencies are Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Ripple (XRP), Tether (USDT) and Ethereum Classic (ETC). However, the exchange is working hard to track the address and recover the funds.
The company is working with CipherTrace, Chainalysis and Crystal to trace the hackers’ addresses. The funds would be tagged as criminal and high risk, making it challenging for the attacker to sell the funds to innocent users.
So far, EXMO has traced some of the stolen funds (XRP and ETH) to the Poloniex exchange and contacted its support team to disable the associated account. Most of the stolen bitcoins were sent to an address with 306.99 BTC, worth around $7,183,259 at the time of writing.
EXMO users can once again withdraw their funds starting tomorrow. “We are planning on enabling deposits and withdrawals on Thursday, 24 December 2020″, EXMO announced. The exchange also advised its users to refrain from depositing cryptocurrencies to existing wallets.
Internally, EXMO is still investigating the hack and came to a few conclusions. EXMO keeps different servers for cryptocurrency wallets and all other platform data (production data). The production data is unaffected by the breach, which means that the hacker did not have access to information about transactions and clients.
EXMO will also be taking a few measures to ensure such a breach doesn’t happen in future. The exchange plans to use a third party custody provider for hot wallets and to decrease stored cryptos on hot wallets to 4-7% from the current 5-10%. Finally, EXMO will also work to expand and strengthen its security department.
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Hassan Maishera, @KhareemSudlow
