Digital marketplace BitMart fell yet another victim of hackers in early December, reporting that it had lost $150 million worth of cryptocurrency as a result of a hack. But this is far from the first such case in the crypto market. What other exchanges have suffered from hackers and how much money did they lose?
On December 4, BitMart management wrote that the exchange was “hacked.” The attack, which resulted in trading platform clients losing $150 million in cryptocurrencies, targeted Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain hot wallets.
Source: twitter.com
The exchange later promised to reimburse clients' losses from its own funds and is going to soon restore access to blocked wallets. But BitMart is far from the first victim of hacker attacks, and the losses it has suffered are, in fact, far from the most significant. There have been at least several cases in the market where attackers were able to inflict much more serious damage on crypto exchanges.
A sad list
For example, in August 2021, the Poly Network trading platform became a target of hackers. As a result of this attack, the crypto exchange lost $610 million - this is the largest loss in the history of cryptocurrency trading platforms. However, this story had a happy ending. The exchange later stated that, as a result of cooperation with the hacker who attacked it named Mr White Hat hacker all damage suffered by its clients. The hacker himself stated that he stole the money for fun and only wanted to prove that the Poly Network security system had many flaws.
In 2018, hackers attacked the Coincheck exchange, stealing its client accounts amount to $534 million. As a result of this attack, more than 200 thousand exchange users were affected, who, however, later received partial compensation for their losses from the management of the trading platform. As the exchange itself later admitted, such a hack became possible due to technical problems at the trading platform and an insufficient number of employees.
The case of Mt. is also notorious. Gox, whose clients lost $460 million due to an extremely weak system for protecting money in their accounts. Moreover, the thefts occurred over several years at once - from 2011 to 2014, after which the trading platform had to declare bankruptcy, and its clients never received their money back and are still suing on this issue..
As practice shows, even a very large crypto exchange can become a victim of a hacker attack - almost no one is immune from this. To minimize such risks, it is better not to store funds on trading platforms at a time when you do not plan to use them for crypto trading, but to use reliable crypto wallets for storage.
Author: Dmitry Noskov - expert of the StormGain crypto exchange (platform for trading, exchanging and storing cryptocurrency)
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