Crooks stole millions from Bitrue Cryptocurrency Exchange

Another cryptocurrency exchange announced to have suffered a theft, this time is the victim is the Singapore-based Bitrue.

It has happened again, crooks stole funds from another cryptocurrency exchange, this time the victim is the Singapore-based Bitrue.

Bitrue revealed on Thursday that hackers accessed the accounts of tens of its customers and stole their funds.

The company confirmed in a message posted on Twitter that attackers exploited a vulnerability in its Risk Control team’s second review process, the incident impacted roughly 90 users.

Dear Bitrue Users,

First of all, please let us assure you that this situation is under control, 100% of lost funds will be returned to users, and we are reviewing our security measures and policies to ensure this does not happen again.

— Bitrue (@BitrueOfficial) June 27, 2019

At approximately 1am June 27 (GMT+8), a hacker exploited a vulnerability in our Risk Control team's 2nd review process to access the personal funds of about 90 Bitrue users.

— Bitrue (@BitrueOfficial) June 27, 2019

The attackers transferred 9.3 million XRP (worth roughly $4 million) and 2.5 million ADA (worth roughly $230,000) to other exchanges. The company is working with involved exchanges (i.e. Huobi, Bittrex, ChangeNOW and EXMO) to block the transactions and recover the stolen funds.

Bitrue reported the incident to local authorities and asked individuals who have information about the breach to contact it via email or Twitter.

The exchange claims the funds of impacted individuals are insured and it has promised that everyone will get their money back.

The good news is that Bitrue quickly detected the hack and adopted all the necessary countermeasures to limit the damages.

“The attack was soon detected, and activity was temporarily suspended on Bitrue. We alerted the receiving exchanges about the situation, and wish to extend our thanks to @HuobiGlobal, @BittrexExchange and @ChangeNOW_io for their help in freezing the affected funds and accounts.” reads a Tweet posted 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” the exchange added.

Cryptocurrency exchanges are a profitable target for cybercriminals, in the past few years, many companies reported thefts of millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency. The list of hacked exchanges includes Bithumb Binance, Coinrail, Zaif, Coincheck, and Bitfinex.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – BiTrue Exchange, hacking)

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