Japan’s Liquid Global confirms breach as hacker makes away with $80M
Hacks and data breaches happen on an almost weekly basis. Cryptocurrency exchange hacks are particularly damaging because they typically affect thousands of users and involve the loss of funds.
Unfortunately, the same is the case today as well, with the latest such development emerging from Japan.
Liquid Global (Official), ranked among the top 10 cryptocurrency exchanges based on daily traded spot volume with deep BTC/JPY liquidity, is trending now, but for all the wrong reasons.
As per an official statement, the exchange was hacked and more than $80 million in digital assets moved off the platform. The exchange confirmed the security breach in a tweet that read,
The following assets had been transferred to hacker's following addresses (Further investigation to come):
BTC: 1Fx1bhbCwp5LU2gHxfRNiSHi1QSHwZLf7q
ETH/EWT: 0x5578840aae68682a9779623fa9e8714802b59946
TRX: TSpcue3bDfZNTP1CutrRrDxRPeEvWhuXbp
XRP: rfapBqj7rUkGju7oHTwBwhEyXgwkEM4yby— Liquid Global Official (@Liquid_Global) August 19, 2021
In a follow-up tweet, the exchange shared four blockchain addresses – in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tron, and XRP – directly related to the hacker.
Now, Liquid Global executives didn’t comment on the amount lost. However, based on the aforementioned addresses, more than 107 BTC (worth around $4.7 million), 9,000,000 TRX, 11,000,000 XRP, and around $69 million worth of ETH and ERC-20 tokens (14,537 ETH & ERC 2O tokens worth 7,039 ETH) were taken by the hacker.
At the time of writing, the exchange was yet to release a post-mortem report of the incident. The latest update from the platform revealed that,
“We are currently tracing the movement of the assets and working with other exchanges to freeze and recover funds.”
Needless to say, reactions were immediate and vocal. KuCoin CEO Johnny Lyu, for instance, acknowledged the incident on Twitter and commented,
We are aware of the #LiquidGlobal security incident, and the hacker's addresses have been added to the blacklist of #KuCoin. Hope everything is OK. ? https://t.co/IasscGItZH
— Johnny_KuCoin (@lyu_johnny) August 19, 2021
This article will be updated as soon as more information is made available by the exchange…