Bithumb, South Korea’s second-largest crypto exchange, says an unauthorised outside party accessed one of its internal systems, leading to a leak of personal information.
The exchange said the intruder got into its internal mobile groupware system, the software staff use for internal communication and work, South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reported on Wednesday.
What is known so far
Bithumb said it is still investigating whether customer data was compromised. An industry source told Yonhap that some personal information belonging to Bithumb customers had leaked.
Bithumb had not said how many people were affected, what data was involved, how its system was accessed, or whether any funds were at risk at the time of writing.
A wider wave of attacks
The breach comes amid a run of hacks at South Korean financial firms. The Financial Services Commission said attacks have hit 16 financial companies, including banks, causing about 100,000 data leaks. Financial authorities have begun inspecting the recent incidents.
On the same day, brokerage Daishin Securities said personal information for 38,490 customers, including names, email addresses and mobile phone numbers, leaked after it detected unauthorised access the previous week. Asset manager Mirae Asset Global Investments also confirmed a hacking incident.
South Korea’s Science Ministry and the Korea Internet & Security Agency have urged website operators to check for recently disclosed flaws in PHP, a widely used web programming language, that let attackers run commands on a server without logging in. Neither had linked those flaws to the Bithumb breach at the time of writing.
A difficult year for Bithumb
In February, Bithumb mistakenly credited 695 users with a combined 620,000 BTC during a promotion. The coins existed only on its internal ledger, and the exchange said it recovered 99.7% of them.
In March, South Korea’s Financial Intelligence Unit fined Bithumb 36.8 billion won, about $24.6 million, over anti-money laundering failures and ordered a partial suspension of its business. A Seoul court blocked the suspension in April.
What happens next
The key details still to come are whether customer data was taken and how many users were affected. Bithumb customers should be alert to phishing messages claiming to come from the exchange.
