The Zaif exchange, owned by Tech Bureau and registered in Japan, lost 6.7 billion yen after the cybercriminals’ invasion, which customers of the service stored in deposit accounts.
Hackers caused significant financial damage to the crypto exchange Zaif, which is managed by Tech Bureau Corp., which is oriented to the Japanese market. The corporation’s statement says that the intruders who infiltrated the Exchange servers withdrew three types of cryptocurrency, in particular bitcoins, the total value of which at the time of the theft was 6.7 billion yen, or about $ 60 million. The theft, which was officially recognized on September 20, took place on the last Friday. Hacker attack lasted about two hours – from 17:00 to 19:00, but the security service of the exchange revealed an unauthorized intrusion only three days later, on September 17. Another day was required to calculate the amount, which became the prey of intruders.
Tech Bureau, whose headquarters is located in Osaka, has frozen all transactions on the exchange until the aftermath of the attack. It is already known that 4.5 billion yen, or $ 40 million, of stolen funds, were placed by customers in deposit accounts. The remaining 2.2 billion yen, or $ 20 million, related to the capital of Zaif itself. The incident was reported to the Financial Services Agency of Japan, which will conduct its own investigation.
Hackers managed to seize 5 thousand 966 bitcoins, they also took the cryptocurrencies Bitcoin Cash and MonaCoin. The administration of the exchange said that customers whose funds were stolen will get compensation. The online exchange partner Fisco Digital Asset Group has already approved the allocation of $ 44.5 million. This transaction will allow the company to get a controlling stake in Tech Bureau, which announced massive personnel castling in top management. Every second director and auditor will lose their posts.
It is noteworthy that the national Financial Services Agency has already expressed concern about the inadequate security of services belonging to the Tech Bureau. The reason for the orders was a resonant malfunction, which took place on February 16 this year. Then the clients of the exchange took advantage of the error of the resource programs and added the bitcoins to their accounts free of charge, whose current exchange rate was $ 20 trillion.
Commenting on the failure, the corporation stated that the malfunctions were of a technical nature, recognizing that individual users, using a malfunction for mercenary purposes, not only enrolled free bitcoins in their accounts but also promptly put them up for sale. They could not bring these transactions to completion. It is noteworthy that the report on the failure of the corporation was published only 5 days after the incident – on February 21. The report indicated that bitcoins were mistakenly credited to 7 accounts. The failure lasted 18 minutes. All transactions with unreasonably enrolled bitcoins were blocked, and user accounts were returned to their original state.
Hackers also invaded the work of other crypto exchanges. June 20, the victim of the cyber threat was the South Korean exchange Bithumb. On the accounts under their control, attackers transferred crypto units worth $ 32 million. As Bloomberg noted, after the hacking, the resource temporarily stopped functioning, and the clients whose accounts were abducted returned the losses. After that, the exchange established for permanent users secure electronic wallets, to which there is no online connection. A few weeks earlier, another online exchange of South Korea, Coinrail, suffered from hacking. Then the attackers seized the ICO-tokens of a number of promising start-ups worth $ 40 million. According to the Techcrunch resource, among the abductees were tokens of NPXS, Aston X, Dent and Tron.
The record-breaking robbery happened with the Coincheck exchange, operating in Japan. Hacking was carried out in January this year. Hackers took 523 million coins of NEM cryptocurrency. After the abduction, the attackers stored money for several days in controlled accounts, after which they put them up for sale. As the interlocutors of Reuters noted, the main suspects in the attack were hackers from North Korea. In March, the owners of the exchange said that they would pay compensation to victims of hacking in traditional money at a rate of $ 0.84 per one coin.
