In a well-coordinated attack, Remitano Crypto Exchange allegedly suffered a major security breach, resulting in a loss of about $2.7 million across various cryptocurrencies.
This attack was picked up on the radar on Sept. 14, when major withdrawals and suspicious activities began to ripple across the exchange, raising the eyebrows of several blockchain analytics networks.
Yesterday, Cyvers Alerts, a network focused on spotting and highlighting suspicious activities on blockchains, sounded an alarm about multiple unusual transactions involving the Remitano exchange.
Remitano is a popular peer-to-peer crypto exchange network that primarily caters to emerging markets like Pakistan, Kenya, Venezuela, Ghana, Cambodia, Nigeria, Malaysia, India, South Africa, and Vietnam.
Cyvers Alerts, the machine learning-driven system, discovered this alert at approximately 12:45 p.m. on Sept. 14, when a wallet owned by Remitano began making hefty crypto transfers, offloading about $2.7 million worth of digital assets.
Based on the released detailed analysis, the suspicious transactions comprised $1.4 million in Tether, $208,000 in USD Coin, and Ankr tokens valued at $2,000 at the time.
As per Cyver’s tweets, the suspected stolen amounts were immediately transferred to a newly minted address, 0x74530e81. Cyvers’ tweet also noted: “We contacted the team to halt any additional losses and initiate efforts to recover suspected stolen funds.”
Following the alarm on these transactions, Tether, a popular stablecoin issuer, froze the $1.4 million USDT, preventing the major share of the total assets from being completely lost.
Remitano has yet to respond to questions about the attack. As such, the details of all coins stolen remain private.
The attack brought a new wave of questions about the role of North Korean hackers in the suspicious activities. One user asked: “Is it done by North Koreans as well? Two exchanges got exploited within 1 week.”
According to reports, another crypto exchange network, CoinEX, was hacked and drained of $27 million just about a week ago. When writing this report, the amounts stolen from CoinEX had risen to about $55 million, including 231 BTC, 6,559 ETH, 137.128 million TRX, and more ERC-20 tokens.
Furthermore, a popular gambling site, Stake, suffered a similar hit, with the losses amounting to $41 million. The losses combined amount to over $95 million in barely a fortnight.
Earlier this month, CertiK disclosed that about $1 billion had been stolen via hacks from crypto projects since the dawn of the year.