One of the Largest Singapore Exchanges Just Got Hacked For A Suspected $6 Million

News has broken that Singapore-based exchange DragonEx has been hacked, and the total losses stand at $6 million, according to a report by 8btc.

On March 24, company officials made the announcement via their Telegram group, saying that funds had been stolen and transferred to other addresses. DragonEx had shut down operations and began maintenance on the platform upon discovering the hack, and revealed the breach later in the day.

Crypto assets that had been stolen include Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and EOS (EOS), though the total number amounts to over 20 popular tokens.

The Telegram post describes how DragonEx has informed officials from several jurisdictions:

…our users’ crypto assets and platform crypto assets were transferred and stolen. Part of the assets were retrieved back, and we will do our best to retrieve back the rest of the stolen assets. Several judicial administrations were informed about this cyber crime case including Estonia, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong etc. and we’re assisting policemen to do investigation. All platform services will be closed and the accurate asset losses will be announced in a week. For the loss caused to our users, DragonEx will take the responsibility no matter what.

The 8btc report states that the PeckShield security team has already looked into the hack and preliminary analysis indicates a loss of just over $6 million, of which roughly $5 million is still missing.

DragonEx has called on other exchanges and industry members to help, saying:

We earnestly request help from all our fellow exchanges and other industry strength, please help us to investigate and traced the assets, freeze them and stop the assets flows.

Huobi and gate.io, exchanges to which some of the assets were transferred, have already blocked the funds. DragonEx has also published wallet addresses to which the 20 or so crypto assets had been transferred.

This is not the first crypto exchange hack in 2019. Earlier this year, New Zealand exchange Cryptopia and its local officials scrambled to nab the perpetrators of a hack that resulted in approximately $16 million stolen — some of which were sent to Binance, which were then frozen.

Crypto exchange security continues to be an important focus in the space, given the potential for theft and losses.

The QuadrigaCX incident, which still continues, has left many a user waiting for their funds to be returned, and the specific decisions that led to the inaccessibility of the funds — private keys owned by its deceased founder Gerald Cotten — have only further underscored the need for an improvement in how exchanges operate.