Singapore exchange Bitrue breached in a $4.7 million heist

By Jimmy Aki

Another exchange has fallen foul to hackers.

Singapore-based Bitrue has lost nearly $5 million of cryptocurrency, in both XRP and Cardano (ADA), as it becomes the latest exchange to suffer a security breach. This comes shortly after GateHub was hacked for almost twice the amount.

Bitrue disclosed that the attackers had exploited a vulnerability in one of its internal review processes, and the information gleaned from it was used to breach the accounts of about 90 Bitrue users. 

Once in, the attackers transferred 9.3 million XRP and 2.5 million ADA to different exchanges. The stolen XRP was trading at $0.488 and ADA at $0.095 at the time, bringing the monetary value of XRP stolen to $4.5 million, and ADA at $237,500. Bitrue released the tracking details of the stolen funds, and credited the Huobi, Bittrex and ChangeNOW exchanges for freezing all funds and accounts associated with the hack.

Bitrue has suspended transactions on the platform, as is expected when breaches of this magnitude occur. They have also informed their user base that their funds are insured and anyone affected by the hack would be reimbursed by the company.

“Right now we are conducting an emergency inspection of the exchange and hope to be live again as soon as possible with log in & trading functionality. Withdrawals will be offline for a slightly longer period while we continue investigating the situation,” stated Bitrue’s official Twitter account.

Crypto theft has been a profitable venture for criminals, with crypto exchanges losing over $356 million in the first three months of 2019, according to a report from CipherTrace. And the trend shows no signs of abating with the recent Bitrue hack.

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