Bitget freezes $1.1 million after nearly $388 million theft — CNBC
Crypto exchange Bitget has frozen about $1.1 million of the nearly $388 million stolen in a cyberattack last week. At the same time, the frozen assets have not necessarily been returned to the exchange, and the company did not disclose the amount of funds already recovered, CNBC reports.
Expectations for fund recovery
Bitget CEO Gracy Chen said she does not expect a significant portion of the stolen assets to be recovered, citing limited recovery results following previous hacks of cryptocurrency exchanges. According to her, user account balances were not affected by the attack.
Before the theft, Bitget valued its protection fund at more than $464 million. After the attack, its size fell to less than $200 million, according to Bloomberg's calculations based on the disclosed wallet addresses of the fund. The company restored the fund to more than $300 million using its own capital. Chen stressed that the fund can be verified on the blockchain and is separate from the reserves backing client balances.
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Investigation data
Reports by Mandiant, part of Google Cloud, and blockchain security company SlowMist dated September 30 state that the attackers compromised two security products from third-party vendors and then gained access to Bitget's production wallet systems. SlowMist found that the earliest malicious activity in the available logs was recorded on August 31, when a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability in one of the products was exploited.
According to Mandiant, the attackers gained privileged internal access and bypassed the standard client withdrawal procedure without stealing private keys. The reports do not establish North Korea's involvement in the attack, although Chen previously said that preliminary technical indicators were very similar to known North Korean hacking groups. Bitget has already resumed withdrawals of bitcoin, ether and USDT, and planned to restore the remaining crypto assets, fiat and P2P services on Friday.
