A CoinEx hot wallet has transferred $27 million worth of various tokens to a wallet with no previous transaction history, in what is now being touted as a suspected hack. The cryptocurrency exchange has referred to this as “anomalous withdrawals”.
According to details available, a well-known CoinEx hot wallet sent roughly 4,947 Ether, which was then valued $7.9 million, to an Ethereum account at 1:21 PM UTC. Before this transaction, the recipient account had no prior transaction history. The CoinEx hot wallet then started sending significant quantities of tokens to the same address just after this transaction was completed. The wallet was moved with roughly 408,741 Dai Stablecoins, 2.7 million Graph (GRT) tokens, 29,158 Uniswap tokens, and numerous other tokens.
CoinEx also acknowledged on Twitter that there had been some questionable withdrawals around
5:25 PM UTC. It said: “Our Risk Control System detected anomalous withdrawals from several hot wallet addresses used to store CoinEx’s exchange assets,” adding that a “special investigative team” had been formed to find out what had happened.
Security experts believe that CoinEx was hacked on September 12, 2023. Blockchain security tool Cyvers Alerts has calculated the damages to be at $27 million. Blockchain security company PeckShield has also described the outflow as “suspicious”. Julio Moreno, the head of research at CryptoQuant, said that the CoinEx wallet’s behaviour was “strange” given that its Ether reserves “are basically zero ETH” at this point.
CoinEx has, however, clarified that the withdrawn cryptocurrency represents only a small portion of the exchange’s entire reserves, and that consumers “will receive 100 per cent compensation for any loss due to this breach.”
Gary Gensler, chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has said that the regulator is employing artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to monitor the financial industry for indications of fraud and manipulation.
“So, we already do in some market surveillance and enforcement actions… To look for patterns in the market. ... It’s one of the reasons why we’ve asked Congress for greater funding this year, in 2024, to help build up our technology budget for the emerging technologies,” he said.
Gensler’s comments came in response to a query from Senator Catherine Cortez Masto during a Senate oversight hearing on September 12, 2023.
Previously, Gensler had made arguments for incorporating AI technologies into the SEC’s surveillance plan at a speech before the National Press Club on July 17, 2023, but until today, the agency’s explicit use of the technology hadn’t been made public.
The Ethereum Blockchain project, Milady Maker, which uses non fungible tokens (NFTs), was the target of a significant hack involving platform fees and social media accounts.
Charlotte Fang, co-founder of the Milady Maker NFT collection, said on X (formerly Twitter) on September 11, 2023 that a developer within the Milady ecosystem had been successful in siphoning out roughly $1 million in generated fees from Remilia Corporation. Fang said that Remilia Corporation has “easily identified” the individuals involved in the exploit and will start legal action.
The decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) that created Milady Maker NFT is called Remilia. According to a statement by Fang, the DAO’s experimental finance art project, Bonkler, which was launched in April 2023, has put its earnings at risk.
