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Indian Crypto Exchange WazirX Loses $230M in a Hack

Twitter icon  •  Published 4 months ago  •  Hassan Maishera

Indian crypto exchange WazirX was the victim of a security breach and lost over $230 million, accounting for roughly 45% of its total holdings.

TL;DR

  • WazirX experienced a security breach, resulting in one of its multisig wallets losing over $230 million.

  • The hacker is already selling the stolen tokens on the Uniswap decentralized exchange.

WazirX Losses $230M in a Security Breach

Indian crypto exchange WazirX experienced a security breach on Thursday, resulting in the loss of customer funds. The exchange lost over $230 million, with most of the funds in SHIB and USDT. 

While confirming the incident in an X post, WazirX said,

"We're aware that one of our multisig wallets has experienced a security breach. Our team is actively investigating the incident. To ensure the safety of your assets, INR and crypto withdrawals will be temporarily paused."

According to Blockchain sleuth Elliptic, North Korea-linked hackers are behind the attack.

The company’s June report indicates that the stolen funds account for nearly 50% of WazirX’s $500 million holdings. WazirX also revealed that the crypto custody firm Liminal is the multisig wallet's provider. However, Liminal clarified that the wallets that were created outside of the Liminal ecosystem had been compromised.

Blockchain data obtained by Lookonchain revealed that most of the stolen funds were in SHIB, the native token of the Shiba Inu ecosystem. Over $100 million worth of Shiba Inu (SHIB) tokens were withdrawn from the exchange, with an additional $52 million in ether (ETH), $11 million in Matic's MATIC, and $6 million in Pepe (PEPE).

The hacker is actively selling the stolen assets using the Uniswap decentralized exchange. However, the attacker has yet to sell their ETH stash while also holding over $4.2 million in FLOKI tokens.

WazirX is one of the leading cryptocurrency exchanges in India and is registered with the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU).

Crypto projects continue to lose money to hacks and other forms of cyberattacks. Last month, Ethereum-based zk-rollup Loopring lost $5 million in a hack after 'Guardian' two-factor authentication service breach.

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Author

Hassan Maishera

Hassan is a Nigeria-based financial content creator that has invested in many different blockchain projects, including Bitcoin, Ether, Stellar Lumens, Cardano, VeChain and Solana. He currently works as a financial markets and cryptocurrency writer and has contributed to a large number of the leading FX, stock and cryptocurrency blogs in the world.