The South Korean cryptocurrency exchange GDAC was reportedly hacked on Sunday for approximately $13 million in assets. The hacked assets include approximately 61 BTC, 350.5 ETH, 10 million WEMIX, and 220,000 USDT.
GDAC CEO SeungHwan Han elaborated on the event in an official statement pertaining to the time and the specifics plus the magnitude of the hack.
At around 7 am on Sunday, April 09, 2023, a hack occurred in the Gdac Hot Wallet, and the following amount of assets were transferred to an unidentified wallet. This is approximately 23% of Gdac’s current total custodial assets… Currently, we are doing our best by collaborating with various organizations.
Notably, the assets lost in the said hack amount to 23% of GDAC’s total managed assets. The hacked amount was transferred to an anonymous wallet, as stated by the exchange in the statement released on Monday.
The official notice from the GDAC exchange, serving only token-to-token transactions, revealed that the “hack occurred at GDAC Hot Wallet.” GDAC’s CEO SeungHwan Han, after confirming the hack via the monitoring system, immediately attended to the “emergency response.”
The GDAC exchange, losing over US$13.1 million in Bitcoin, Ether, Wemix and USDT, witnessed over US$10 million being lost in Wemix alone. Following the hack, GDAC officially suspended the withdrawal and deposit services, apart from reporting the hack event to the Korea Internet and Security Agency (KISA) and the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU).
GDAC also placed a request to other crypto exchanges to stall incoming transactions from fishy addresses. GDAC also got in touch with the concerned authorities to initiate the steps to recover the funds. The deposits and withdrawals are suspended to safeguard customer assets, Han stated.
As per blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, cryptocurrency hacks amounted to over US$3.8 billion in 2022. In the concerned analysis, Chainalysis stated that “total value stolen in crypto hacks and number of hack, 2016-2022” is as follows:
In the said study, Chainalysis also revealed that hackers linked to North Korea broke records by stealing $1.7 billion in 2022.
