BtcTurk loses $52 million to hackers in Turkey

The news was confirmed by BtcTurk on Saturday, detailing the attack and the subsequent loss of consumer funds. An estimated $52 million was lost in the attack, an official said on the company’s official X account.

“Our teams have detected that there was a cyberattack on our platform on June 22, 2024, which caused uncontrolled withdrawals to be processed. Only some of the balances in the hot wallets of 10 cryptocurrencies were affected by the cyberattack in question, and our cold wallets, where most of the assets are kept, are safe,” the company added.

The vulnerability was apparently tied to hot crypto wallets, which means that the funds were accessible online, and not moved to hardware storage devices, which is usually the case for most serious crypto exchanges.

The amount that was left on the hot wallets is significant, which means that either BtcTurk did not take the necessary precautions, or the hackers had buried themselves deep in the exchange’s system and struck at the right time when there was more funds available.

BtcTurk has hurried to reassure customers that their funds have not been affected as the company will be fitting the bill for the amounts lost while also revising its security and running detailed research to analyze the source of the vulnerability.

A temporary halt of deposits and withdrawals was enacted. In the meantime, ZachXBT, a crypto sleuth, has said that he is already on the case, and has analyzed the culprit. He provided the address of the attackers in a Twitter post and noted that what is most likely stolen money had been moved through Coinbase and THORChain.

ZachXBT has played pivotal role in helping bust open several high profile cases over the past months, mostly tracking down culprits quickly and monitoring the public ledger for stolen money. Attacks on crypto exchanges are quite often.

They have continued to mount. The biggest perpetrators of such attacks are usually Russian and North Korean hacker groups with loose or outright ties to their central governments and intelligence services.

Yet, the attack against BtcTurk is still an open case with no one culprit publicly named by any party.

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