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By Jhoo Dong-chan
Cyber criminals stole an estimated 35 billion won ($31.5 million) worth of virtual coins from Bithumb, the nation's largest crypto exchange, over late Tuesday through Wednesday.
Bithumb disclosed the cyberattack on Wednesday. It said Wednesday in a Twitter post it won't receive any deposits "due to the increasing safety issues." The service will be temporarily suspended as they are undergoing a system check.
"All deposit and withdrawal services will be stopped to ensure security. We will notify you of the restart of the service. We apologize for any inconvenience and thanks for your understanding," the exchange said.
However, Bithumb did not specify when it would resume its deposit and withdrawal services.
"There was a series of unusual external movements last weekend. Bithumb immediately transferred 70 percent of virtual coins into a cold wallet following the attempts," a Bithumb official told The Korea Times.
Bithumb reported the cyberattack to the Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA) immediately.
The official added Bithumb will take full responsibility for the loss.
"Stolen virtual coins have been 100 percent reimbursed and transferred to the cold wallet. We will fully cooperate with the KISA investigation to find out who's behind this," she said.
"Many virtual coins, including Ripple, were stolen. But I think it is not appropriate to fully disclose which coins were stolen at this point since the investigation is ongoing."
Following the crypto exchange's announcement, bitcoin fell from about $6,718.35 to as low as $6,561.79, according to virtual coin price index Coinmarketcap.com. The price was $6,631.65 as of 3:00 p.m. Wednesday, down 1.48 percent from 24 hours earlier.
This follows a similar cyberattack earlier this month in which Korea's seventh-largest cryptocurrency exchange Coinrail lost 40 billion won.
Korea has become one of the busiest virtual coin-trading countries in the world, and Bithumb is the nation's largest crypto exchange in trade volume. It is also the world's seventh-largest exchange with daily trading volume of 500 billion won worth of virtual coins.
"A series of cyberattacks starting from an exchange in Japan sustained a severe blow to the market," an industry analyst said.
"Government authorities and exchanges should come up with countermeasures to prevent similar incidents from happening."
