Bitcoin Forum

Fourth largest Bitcoin exchange. Bithumb, hacked for billions of Won

The largest bitcoin and ether exchange in South Korea by volume, Bithumb, was recently hacked. Monetary losses from compromised accounts have started to surface, and are quickly reaching into the billions of won.

The exchange also hosts the world's largest ether market. While trade in the South Korean won currently makes up the fourth largest currency market for bitcoin, trailing the US dollar, Chinese yuan and Japanese yen, the won market is Ethereum’s largest. Bithumb accounts for around 44 percent of South Korean ether trading.

A cyber attack late last week resulted in the loss of billions of won from customers accounts, according to a major local newspaper, the Kyunghyang Shinmun. One victim alone claimed that "Bitcoins worth 10 million won” in his account “disappeared instantly.”


https://bravenewcoin.com/news/fourth-largest-bitcoin-exchange-bithumb-hacked-for-billions-of-won/

It's all part of the growing process I guess.... In the western world we have gone through the same difficulties years ago (still the case today), where exchanges and services got hacked and lost user coins as result. I just feel sorry for those that have lost their coins. I seriously hope that they will get fully compensated, but I highly doubt that.

It is not just the crypto and the fiat which were stolen. The personal information (including passwords) of thousands of Bithumb users were stolen as well. This is going to be very worrying.

For those in the U.S., 1000 won is about $1, so billions of won is millions of dollars, and millions of won is thousands of dollars.

I guess this is part of the growing pains when you are in the bitcoin business, specially exchanges. Hackers are really targeting them because of the money involved are huge. Only thing I can say is that security should be tight so that they are a step ahead of those hackers. I just hope that people will not lose hope in these exchange and will still trust them. And Koreans affected should change their passwords as its already compromise.

This is worrying. Even if you do use different passwords in different websites, the possibility of the hackers using the personal information for social engineering is unsettling. Even people who didn't lose much money have cause to worry.

To a certain extent it is indeed worrying, but the problem is that we are all exposed to this, since we make use of these centralized exchanges that are forcing us to fully verify ourself. In some cases we don't even know that an exchange got hacked and got a large portion of its user data compromised. We all depend on these exchanges to offer open communication if such a thing happens, but what if they don't? Only solution is to go P2P then...

More than 90% of the users don't use different passwords for different sites. And some don't even have 2FA or Google authentication enabled. The data stolen from Bithumb will be definitely used for further robberies.

Crypto is a large field for hackers. We will see a lot more of that.

Where we go again with "hacked." I don't even know what to believe in anymore. These news comes popping up whenever the prices are really high. Should we investigate the hacking or the owners and administrators of those exchange? I think the latter are more interesting to investigate than seeing if there was really a hack.

That's just the thing it is not only the exchange to follow some stringent controls sometimes users are at fault with the use of same passwords which makes it easy to be compromised by the alleged hackers.
These hacks will keep going if we do not learn to follow the basic security Dos and Don'ts !

But does Bithumb have the 2FA? Because I tried to register and I didn't see any 2FA option, is it possible?!  ???

This is alarming and at the same time i am have doubts on this incident, Should i believe that they are hacked? Everything Bitcoin is rallying there is a news about this exchange this blah blah blah have been hacked, it's their way of generating profit? someone should investigate it and isn't it really too obvious that this attack didn't happened before the price rally of Bitcoin but rather it happened when Bitcoin is moving fast on an uptrend movement. This is worrying because it may create FUD to someone and stop trusting and using online exchanges.