Hackers Steal $19 Million From Bithumb Cryptocurrency Exchange

Mar 30, 2019

Hackers yesterday stole nearly $19 million worth of
cryptocurrency from Bithumb, the South Korea-based popular
cryptocurrency exchange admitted today.

According to Primitive Ventures’ Dovey Wan, who first broke the
information on social media, hackers managed to compromise a number
of Bithumb’s hot EOS and XRP wallets and transferred around 3
million EOS (~ $13 million) and 20 million XRP (~ $6 million) to
his newly-created accounts.

The hacker then distributedly transferred the stolen digital
assets to his different accounts created on other cryptocurrency
exchanges, including Huobi, HitBTC, WB, and EXmo, via ChangeNow, a
non-custodial crypto swap platform does not require
KYC/account.

Bithumb has been hacked multiple times in the past. Last time the
popular cryptocurrency exchange was hacked in June 2018, when
hackers stole $31 million, and in July 2017, when hackers
stole $1 million worth of EOS from many wallets belonging to
its users.

“And this is the second time Bithumb saw a MAJOR hack, last time it
was hacked with a loss over $30m.. lol and after the first hack it
was STILL able to get the fiat license from Korea and WTF??” Wan
says ^[2] on Twitter.

It has been reported that the private key for the EOS hot wallet
account belonging to Bithumb was stolen (address g4ydomrxhege), which
allowed the hacker to transfer the funds to his address, “ifguz3chmamg.”

The above image shared by Changpeng
Zhao, CEO of Binance cryptocurrency exchange, explains how hacker
distributed his funds after stealing it from Bithumb.
^[5]

Here’s how the hacker distributed and transferred the stolen funds
to his accounts on different exchanges:

EXMO: 662,600
Huobi: 263,605
Changelly 143,511
KuCoin: 96,270
CoinSwitch: 38,725

According to a blog post published
by the company today, Bithumb is still investigating the hack,
which it believes was performed with the help of an insider, and
has reported the breach incident to security firm Korea Internet
and Security Agency (KISA) and cyber police.

“We deeply apologize to our members for delaying the cryptocurrency
deposit and withdrawal service,” Bithumb said.

“As a result of the inspection, it is judged that the incident
is an accident involving insiders because the external intrusion
path has not been revealed until now. Based on the facts, we are
conducting intensive investigations with KISA, Cyber Police
Agency and security companies.”

Meanwhile, Bithumb said the company is working with major
cryptocurrency exchanges and foundations in hope to recover the
loss of the cryptocurrency equivalent.

Last year when the exchange was hacked and lost $30 million in
EOS, it managed to recover half of the stolen funds.

Would Bithumb be able to do the same this time?

^[1]^[3]^[4]^[6]

References

^{^}
hackers stole $1 million
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
says
(twitter.com)
^{^}
g4ydomrxhege
(eospark.com)
^{^}
ifguz3chmamg
(eospark.com)
^{^}
shared
(twitter.com)
^{^}
blog post
(cafe.bithumb.com)

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OWASP TOP !0

Injection. Injection flaws, such as SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. Broken Authentication. Application functions related to authentication and session management are often implemented incorrectly, allowing attackers to compromise passwords, keys, or session tokens, or to exploit other implementation flaws to assume other users’ identities temporarily or permanently. Sensitive Data Exposure. Many web applications and APIs do not properly protect sensitive data, such as financial, healthcare, and PII. Attackers may steal or modify such weakly protected data to conduct credit card fraud, identity theft, or other crimes. Sensitive data may be compromised without extra protection, such as encryption at rest or in transit, and requires special precautions when exchanged with the browser. XML External Entities (XXE). Many older or poorly configured XML processors evaluate external entity references within XML documents. External entities can be used to disclose internal files using the file URI handler, internal file shares, internal port scanning, remote code execution, and denial of service attacks. Broken Access Control. Restrictions on what authenticated users are allowed to do are often not properly enforced. Attackers can exploit these flaws to access unauthorized functionality and/or data, such as access other users’ accounts, view sensitive files, modify other users’ data, change access rights, etc. Security Misconfiguration. Security misconfiguration is the most commonly seen issue. This is commonly a result of insecure default configurations, incomplete or ad hoc configurations, open cloud storage, misconfigured HTTP headers, and verbose error messages containing sensitive information. Not only must all operating systems, frameworks, libraries, and applications be securely configured, but they must be patched/upgraded in a timely fashion. Cross-Site Scripting XSS. XSS flaws occur whenever an application includes untrusted data in a new web page without proper validation or escaping, or updates an existing web page with user-supplied data using a browser API that can create HTML or JavaScript. XSS allows attackers to execute scripts in the victim’s browser which can hijack user sessions, deface web sites, or redirect the user to malicious sites. Insecure Deserialization. Insecure deserialization often leads to remote code execution. Even if deserialization flaws do not result in remote code execution, they can be used to perform attacks, including replay attacks, injection attacks, and privilege escalation attacks. Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities. Components, such as libraries, frameworks, and other software modules, run with the same privileges as the application. If a vulnerable component is exploited, such an attack can facilitate serious data loss or server takeover. Applications and APIs using components with known vulnerabilities may undermine application defenses and enable various attacks and impacts. Insufficient Logging & Monitoring. Insufficient logging and monitoring, coupled with missing or ineffective integration with incident response, allows attackers to further attack systems, maintain persistence, pivot to more systems, and tamper, extract, or destroy data. Most breach studies show time to detect a breach is over 200 days, typically detected by external parties rather than internal processes or monitoring.

Hackers Steal $19 Million From Bithumb Cryptocurrency Exchange

References

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