Bancor an Decentralized Crypto Exchange get Hacked, $12 Million worth of Ether Stolen

Despite cryptocurrency markets maturing, the pandemic of exchange hacks has yet to be resolved. The seventh major cryptocurrency theft in 2018 was a hack on Bancor for $23.5 million that halted trading on July 9, 2018.

In a tweet yesterday, Bancor stated that it has identified a security breach and will investigate into the issue. Bancor has assured that no user wallets were compromised and they would release a more detailed report shortly.

This morning (CEST) Bancor experienced a security breach. No user wallets were compromised. To complete the investigation, we have moved to maintenance and will be releasing a more detailed report shortly. We look forward to being back online as soon as possible.

Source :- https://twitter.com/Bancor/status/1016274867384090624

In a more detailed statement released after an hours later, Bancor outlined the extent of the theft – indicating that following cryto's were stolen in total.

24,984 Ethereum (ETH) worth of ~$12.5M
229M Pundi X (NPXS) worth of ~$1M
3.2M Bancor (BNT) worth of ~$10M

The hack occurred at approximately 00:00 UTC when a wallet used to upgrade some smart contracts was compromised. The wallet has withdrawn ethereum and ERC-20 tokens NPXS and BNT.

The stolen Bancor (BNT) token has since been frozen using a mechanism built into the Bancor Protocol. Bancor stated that this was built in to "be used in an extreme situation to recover from a security breach, allowing Bancor to effectively stop the thief from running away with the stolen tokens"

However, the stolen Ethereum (ETH) and other tokens are still compromised. The wallet containing the stolen Ethereum has been tracked by Etherscan ( 0x8ddfdf60aaffe05c623ba193a186abd1f8024946 ) and can be viewed here. Bancor stated that they are now "working together with dozens of cryptocurrency exchanges to trace the stolen funds and make it more difficult for the thief to liquidate them".

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Centralized or Decentralized Exchange – All Hackable

Appearing in an interview with TechCrunch on July 6, Vitalik Buterin denounced centralized exchanges as having too much authority over cryptocurrency price manipulation. Stating that egregious listing fees and lack of transparency make centralized cryptocurrency exchanges susceptible to abuse of powers, Vitalik stood by his support for decentralized exchanges, such as Bancor. And also said that, "I definitely hope centralized exchanges go burn in hell".

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Exchanges that being Hacked in past

On June 19, Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb was hacked for 350 billion KRW (~$30 million) and was forced to suspend new user account registrations until the security breach was resolved.

In early June, 38,642 ETH (~$20 million) was stolen from insecure Ethereum nodes over the course of three months before the issue was exposed.

Major thefts of cryptocurrency continue to plague the industry and pose an obstruction to global mass adoption.