Indian crypto exchange WazirX on Thursday confirmed it had suffered a security breach after about $230 million in assets were “suspiciously transferred” out of the platform earlier in the day.
The Mumbai-based firm said one of its multisig wallets had suffered a security breach, and it was temporarily pausing all withdrawals from the platform. A multisig wallet requires two or more private keys for authentication. “It appears that the security issue involves one of our Liminal multisig wallets,” WazirX tweeted.
Lookchain, a third-party blockchain explorer, reported that more than 200 cryptocurrencies, including 5.43 billion SHIB tokens, over 15,200 Ethereum tokens, 20.5 million Matic tokens, 640 billion Pepe tokens, 5.79 million USDT, and 135 million Gala tokens were “stolen” from the platform.
Blockchain data suggests the attackers are trying to offload the assets using the decentralized exchange Uniswap. Risk-management platform Elliptic reported that the hackers have affiliation with North Korea.
Liminal, which operates a wallet infrastructure firm, said in a statement to TechCrunch that its preliminary investigation had found that a wallet created outside its ecosystem had been compromised.
“Liminal’s platform is not breached and Liminal’s infrastructure, wallets and assets continue to remain safe,” a company spokesperson added.
About $230 million in missing assets is significant for WazirX, which reported holdings of about $500 million in its June proof-of-reserves disclosure.
CoinSwitch and CoinDCX, two other leading crypto exchanges in India, assured their customers that their funds were secure and unaffected by this incident.
“Our wallet security remains robust,” Sumit Gupta, co-founder and chief executive of CoinDCX, wrote in a tweet.
“We advise all our crypto investors to be mindful of potential market volatility during this time and exercise caution in their trading and investment activities,” tweeted Ashish Singhal, co-founder and chief executive of PeepalCo, the group holding firm of CoinSwitch.
This is the latest setback for WazirX, which separated from Binance in early 2023 after the two crypto exchanges had a public and high-profile fallout in 2022. Two years after Binance announced it had acquired WazirX, the two companies started a dispute over the ownership of the Indian firm. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao eventually said that the two firms hadn’t been able to conclude the deal and moved to terminate Binance’s businesses with the Indian firm.
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