It seems that the hackers of the KuCoin cryptocurrency exchange could not hide for much longer. KuCoin CEO Johnny Lyu claims that several of the platform's hackers have already been found.
On his official Twitter account, the co-founder and CEO of KuCoin Global, Johnny Liu, said that the authorities managed to identify several of the suspects of the hack al exchange de cryptocurrencies, based in Singapore, which occurred on September 25 and resulted in the loss of more than $280 million; a figure much higher than the initial estimate, which was estimated at around $150 million in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and other tokens ERC-20.
In his Twitter thread, Lyu also claims that he and the authorities have strong evidence on who is responsible, although he has not yet provided details of the names of these suspects. Likewise, KuCoin CEO reported that another $64 million in assets were recovered that were sent to several of the suspicious addresses initially reported when the hack occurred, so the recovered sum already exceeds $200 million, according to the latest update reported by the CEO. The joint work that the exchange has been carrying out with the police, its partners and several analysis companies blockchain are giving positive results for the users of this platform.
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KuCoin services are restored
In another tweet, Johnny Lyu also informed the crypto community that KuCoin services are back up and running, so the cryptocurrency exchange platform is “fully operational again.” Lyu assures that he and his team are doing everything they can to restore all services and compensate the platform’s users.
“KuCoin is now fully operational again. My team and I will continue to do our best to offset the impact of the incident. As of now, a total of 31 tokens have opened deposit and withdrawal services, and more tokens will follow, including $BTC, $ETH, and $USDT.”
As of the date of this publication, the services of Newscrypto (NWC), EdenChain (EDN), WOM Protocol (WOM) y aleph.im (ALEPH) They have recently completed the token swap and resumed services on KuCoin, including trading, deposits, and withdrawals. In the case of Newscrypto (NWC), around 53 million NWC tokens have been secured, worth around $11,2 million. For EdenChain (EDN), around 160 million EDN tokens have been secured, worth around $230; the same for WOM Protocol (WOM), which has already secured around 13 million WOM tokens, worth around $3,3 million. And finally, for aleph.im (ALEPH), a total of 8,5 million ALEPH tokens have already been secured, worth around $1,4 million.
One of the biggest hacks in crypto history
As mentioned, it was initially estimated that the KuCoin hack resulted in the theft of around $150 million in tokens and cryptocurrencies, but numerous analyses by blockchain research firms point to the actual sum being somewhere between $280 and $281,5 million stolen. This amount is confirmed by Blockchain Elliptic after an exhaustive investigation. In a publication On its blog, the firm claims that on September 25, $281.455.300 USD in cryptoassets were stolen from KuCoin, a figure that positions this hack as “the third largest theft ever suffered by a crypto exchange,” behind Coincheck y MT Gox.
Source: Blockchain Elliptic
According to Elliptic's research, over $150 million of the stolen assets were comprised of Ethereum (ETH) tokens, such as Tether (USDT), Chainlink (LINK) y Ocean Protocol (OCEAN); followed by Stellar (XLM) and Bitcoin (BTC). However, the firm notes that since most of these tokens (USDT, LINK, OCEAN, and others) are not censorship-resistant, several of the issuing companies began blocking the assets and replacing the stolen tokens. These actions forced the hackers to try to change the tokens quickly before they were all blocked.
Failed exchange attempts
First, the hackers tried to trade the tokens on regulated exchanges, such as Binance, where they had no success. Later, they turned to decentralized exchanges (DEX), as Uniswap, Kyber Network, DEX.AG, 1inch.exchnage y tokenlon, where they did manage to exchange around $19 million of the stolen tokens for Ether (ETH). Still, despite the successful exchange, Elliptic claims it can track the tokens exchanged on DEXs, as these record all movements within the blockchains.
“Elliptic’s blockchain monitoring solutions can trace funds back to the hack and across DEXs.”
In any case, KuCoin guaranteed that the stolen funds are protected by its insurance fund created in 2018, so the stolen tokens and cryptocurrencies will be fully refunded to its users.
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