On Monday, Seychelles-based crypto trading platform HTX lost ETH worth more than $7.5 million to an attacker three weeks after rebranding from Huobi. According to HTX advisor and Tron founder Justin Sun, approximately 5,010 ETH was lost. However, he reported that the crypto exchange had already covered the losses suffered from the exploit.
On-chain detective Peckshield was the first to identify the attack after noticing a suspicious transfer from HTX on Monday morning. The hacker’s crypto addresses have since been identified, and as of this writing, the attacker has yet to transfer the ETH tokens to a crypto exchange to cash them out.
Meanwhile, Sun says the $7.5 million stolen makes up a relatively small portion of the $2.9 billion worth of assets held by HTX users. He reveals that the stolen funds only amount to the crypto exchange’s biweekly revenue.
Data from DefiLlama shows that HTX holds assets worth $2.7 billion. This figure has remained fairly stable since last November. About 29% of the assets are stored in TRX, the native token of the Tron blockchain. Bitcoin holding, which accounts for 27.5% of the $2.7 billion, comes in second.
HTX Aims to Recover Stolen Funds
Although the funds lost to the hacker are small, HTX wants to recover them. In an on-chain message sent to the attacker, the exchange claimed it had unmasked the hacker’s identity, threatening to take legal action if they failed to return the money within seven days.
In an effort to encourage the attacker to refund the funds, Sun wrote on his X account that HTX would offer them 5% or roughly $400,000 of the stolen money as a bounty. The Tron founder also said HTX will hire the exploiter as the exchange’s white-hat advisor.
Meanwhile, Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of the largest crypto exchange by trading volume, Binance, has promised that his company’s security team will help track the movement of the stolen funds and freeze them in case the hacker deposits them into Binance.
HTX isn’t the only crypto exchange to come under attack in recent weeks. At the start of this month, CoinEX lost $53.5 million to Lazarus Group. The exchange shared an open letter to the notorious criminal group on X, stating that it was willing to offer a bug bounty for the hackers to return the funds.
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