Japanese Crypto Exchange DMM Bitcoin Hacked for More Than $300,000,000 Worth of BTC

The Japanese crypto exchange DMM Bitcoin announced on Friday that it had been hacked for more than $300 million worth of BTC.

The exchange said it lost 4502.9 BTC ($305 million) in what the crypto investigative firm Chainalysis called “the seventh-largest crypto hack ever.”

DMM Bitcoin announced the hack on Friday morning and promised it would replace customers’ stolen Bitcoin, though the exchange’s website appeared to be down by Friday evening.

The blockchain security firm Beosin says the stolen funds have been distributed to 10 addresses so far and were likely stolen in one of two ways.

“1. A traditional exchange attack. The signature service of DMM Bitcoin is attacked or the multi-sig private key is compromised. Then the attacker used a similar historical transfer address to receive funds to avoid detection and alert.

2. The exchange wallet controller suffered from an address spoofing scam, that is, only the first five digits and the last two digits of the receiving address were checked during the transfer, resulting in the transfer to the hacker address.”

Chainalysis notes that the DMM Bitcoin exploit is the largest crypto hack since December 2022.

Bitcoin is trading at $67,493 at time of writing. The top-ranked crypto asset by market cap is down nearly 1.5% in the past 24 hours.

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