Tens of billions of Shiba Inu (SHIB) tokens and other digital assets have been stolen from crypto exchange Bitrue in a massive multi-million-dollar exploit.
In a new announcement, Bitrue says that hackers were able to exploit hot wallet to steal about $23 million worth of crypto assets, including Ethereum (ETH), and ERC-20 tokens such as meme asset SHIB, interoperable blockchain Quant (QNT), metaverse gaming platform Gala (GALA), layer-2 scaling solution Polygon (MATIC) and decentralized application (DApp) marketplace Holochain (HOT).
“We have identified a brief exploit in one of our hot wallets on 07:18 (UTC), 14 April 2023. We were able to address this matter quickly and prevented the further [exploitation] of funds. We take this matter seriously and are currently investigating the situation.
The attackers were able to withdraw assets worth approximately $23 million in ETH, QNT, GALA, SHIB, HOT and MATIC. The affected hot wallet only holds less than 5% of our overall funds. The rest of our wallets remain secure and have not been compromised.”
Blockchain security firm PeckShield reveals that the wallet address associated with the bad actor exchanged the stolen QNT, SHIB, HOT and MATIC for approximately 8,540 ETH.
“Bitrue Drainer-labeled address swapped 173,000 QNT, 22.55 billion SHIB, 46.4 million GALA and 310,000 MATIC for ~8,540 ETH.
Bitrue Drainer received ~$22 million worth of cryptos (~320 ETH, 173,000 QNT, 172.55 billion SHIB, 46.4 million GALA, 756.15 million HOT and 310,000 MATIC) from [the address] who received these cryptos from Bitrue three days ago.”
Peckshield notes that QNT suffered an 11% drop in just three hours due to the exploit. QNT went from its seven-day peak of $127.65 to $115.20. The digital asset has since recovered and is trading for $121.32 at time of writing.
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