On Monday, a popular South Korean crypto exchange, GDAC suffered an exploitation on its hot wallet. According to a blog post by the exchange, the exploiter of the wallet stole $13.1 million in Bitcoin, Ether, Wemix and USDT, representing 23% of its total holdings. GDAC claimed the hacker has transferred the stolen funds to an unknown wallet.
Occasioned by this development, GDAC has resolved to halt all withdrawal and deposit offerings on its network. As part of its commitment to unraveling the architect of the hack, the exchange engaged the Korea Internet and Security Agency and the Financial Intelligence Unit.
More so, GDAC has reported the matter to the Police and has called for cyber investigation of the incident. In the same vein, it admonished all other crypto exchanges to help trail and freeze any suspicious transactions on their networks. In addition, the South Korean exchange wants anyone with useful information that can aid the investigation to reach out through any of its channels.
GDAC to resume withdrawals and deposits after the conclusion of the investigation
The exchange, however, called for calm, stressing that it would do everything within the law to recover the stolen funds. GDAC maintained that it cannot ascertain when deposit and withdrawal will resume on the network amid the ongoing investigations. However, it promised to ensure safe withdrawal of assets as soon as the investigation is concluded.
GDAC boasted that as part of its commitment to transparency, it usually employs an external auditor to conduct financial due diligence every quarter. This, according to the exchange, fosters the safe storage of users’ funds. However, with the latest hack on its hot wallet, it promised to collaborate with relevant firms to resolve the problem as fast as possible. Also, GDAC vowed to continuously update its users as it unfolds.
Increasing rate of exploitations in the crypto industry
Since the beginning of the year, there have been incessant occurrences of crypto exploitations. The biggest of all manifested in March after Euler Finance, a renowned crypto lending firm lost $197 million to hackers. According to Certik, the funds stolen from the protocol include 8.87 million $DAI, 34 million $USDC and about 85.8k $stETH. Following the attack, Euler Finance engaged relevant security professionals to tame the attacker. A few days after, the attacker returned 3000 ETH, equivalent to about $5.5 million from the stolen funds.
Meanwhile, the likes of Hedera, Bonq, Launchzone and many more have also suffered a similar fate this year. As for Hedera, the hacker reportedly compromised its smart contract code to steal its liquidity pool tokens. While Bonq lost $120 million in its own exploitation, LaunchZone lost $700,000. Now, with the attack on GDAC, it is not in doubt that exploitations in the crypto industry is becoming alarming.
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