Poloniex Exchange Suffers $100 Million Exploit, Offers 5% Bonus
According to blockchain explorer Etherscan, Poloniex has experienced a suspicious leak of a wallet belonging to a digital asset exchange. Blockchain security organizations believe that the company has been breached, which has led to the flow of up to $100 million dollars by the attackers.
In the year On November 10, millions of crypto assets were transferred from an account called Poloniex 4 on Etherscan. Initial estimates of the losses were around $60 million. However, it was later revealed that more than $100 million was taken by the attackers.
According to Blockchain Security Certike, the incident is likely a “private key compromise.” The security company said that the funds have already been transferred to four foreign holdings, some of the accounts have been converted to Ether (ETH).
@Poloniex is suspected of being hacked.
The Poloniex address ‘0xA910' transferred all tokens to a new address ‘0x0A59' within 40 minutes, with a total value of around $60 million.
‘0x0A59' is currently transferring funds to additional addresses and converting them to $ETH: pic.twitter.com/Kjdw5gIkxa
— Scopescan (@0xScopescan) November 10, 2023
In response to the suspected leaks, the exchange disabled the wallet. However, the exchange has yet to post an official statement about the hack. Cointelegraph also reached out to Poloniex but did not receive an immediate response.
Our wallet has been disabled for maintenance. We will update this thread once the wallet is reactivated.
— Polonics Customer Support (@PoloSupport) November 10, 2023
While the exchange has yet to issue an official statement, Justin Sun, who discovered the exchange in 2019, revealed on X (formerly Twitter) that the team is investigating the hacking incident. According to Sun, users affected by the breach will be reimbursed in full. The executive said the exchange “maintains a healthy financial position” and seeks cooperation with other exchanges to recover the lost funds.
RELATED: Exploits, hackers and fraud to steal nearly $1 billion by 2023: report
Sun offers 5% white hat reward for polonics hacker. The executive said the attacker will be given seven days to return the money before they start working with law enforcement.
BREAKING @Poloniex assets are draining, and TRX is pulling hard. In the last hour alone, Poloniex's wallet, which had over $67 million in assets, is now down to less than $4 million. Can someone explain this? pic.twitter.com/3GdiU6JgpI
— Elja (@Eljaboom) November 10, 2023
Meanwhile, Tron (TRX), one of Sun's other crypto projects, has seen a price increase despite being hit by the negative event, according to digital asset data tracker CoinGecko. The cryptocurrency went from trading at $0.09 to $0.11 on the day of the hack.
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