Poloniex exchange owned by Justin Sun hacked for at least $126 million

Crypto exchange Poloniex, owned by Tron founder Justin Sun, saw more than $126 million worth of crypto assets removed from one of its wallets in a “hacking incident.”

The transfers were first reported by blockchain security firm Peckshield. Blockchain Explorer Etherscan shows a series of transfers from the “Poloniex 4” wallet to the hacker's wallet, including ETH, TRON, the stablecoins USDT and TUSD, and meme coins including PEPE, FLOKI, and SHIB.

Taking a closer look at the hacker's activity, after assets are sent to one of the attacker's wallets, using MetaMask's exchange feature, the assets are primarily sent to USD in seconds before being exchanged.

In one instance, however, the hacker appears to have mishandled at least one transaction, sending $2.5 million worth of stolen Golem tokens (GLM) to a token contract instead of the secondary addresses in the hold. It will be impossible for them to recover this amount.

Not only on the Ethereum blockchain. Additional blockchain data collected by Arkham Intelligence shows that more than 288 million of Tron's native token TRX and 865 of Bitcoin were also wired, bringing the total to more than $126 million.

A tweet from Poloniex's customer support account initially said, “Wallet disabled for maintenance, we'll update this thread once wallet is reactivated.”

Following the incident, Sun tweeted that the exchange is “currently investigating the Poloniex hacking incident,” adding that the exchange “maintains a healthy financial position” and will return affected funds. Sun explained that the exchange is working with other exchanges to “facilitate the recovery” of the allocated funds.

Speaking to Decrypt, the security researcher notes that the hack could be due to compromised private keys, malware or social engineering.

Edited by Liam Kelly.

Editor's Note: This article has been updated to include more details about how much was stolen from Poloniex.