In November of last year, the South Korean cryptocurrency exchange UPbit was hacked.The authors took approximately $ 50 million in ETH. A new report shows that $ 3.2 of the stolen funds have already been mixed up using small transactions to numerous other exchanges.
During November 2019, the popular South Korean crypto exchange UPbit has been hacked. At the time, more than $ 50 million in the second largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum. They were pulled from the exchange to an anonymous account, raising concerns.
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Despite UPbit officials reacting quickly and halting all further transactions. They confirmed a bit later that the hack actually took place. The company's CEO also said they would recover all lost funds from UPbit's corporate assets.
New report indicates that 20 ETH of the total amount stolen has already been laundered. In USD terms, it is worth $ 520M, which is 3.2% of all the funds they stole. The anonymous address that received all the stolen coins when the hack started. It has been linked with numerous small transactions towards many other cryptocurrency exchanges. Some of these exchanges include Binance, Bitfinex, Bitrue, Huobi, Hitbtc and more.
Uppsala Security, the entity behind the Sentinel Protocol, disclosed the information and claims that these transactions are for the sole purpose of money laundering. The firm's president, Patrick Kim, seems to believe that this particular criminal activity will continue:
“We believe hackers continue to launder money through exchanges without sanctions being imposed”.
UPbit update security
The Korean exchange appears to be taking additional steps to improve its security and ensure that similar activities don't happen again. UPbit announced recently that you have updated your ETH wallet security system, and have made old addresses obsolete.
The company has also opened deposits and withdrawals for Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies. Also, clients should remove the old ETH address from their wallets entirely as this could cause future losses.
"A new wallet system has been adopted to deposit and withdraw cryptocurrencies. […] Recovering ETH sent to the old address from now on could be a long and costly process.
