South Korean Crypto Exchange Loses $35 Million in 15-Minute Hot Wallet Hack
- A South Korean exchange lost $35 million in 15 minutes after attackers drained hundreds of hot wallets.
- Multi-chain withdrawal systems and complex cloud setups make CEXs increasingly vulnerable.
- Real-time detection tools like Hexagate and GateSigner can limit losses during wallet breaches.
Earlier this year, one of South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges suffered a major security breach that drained hundreds of hot wallets in just 15 minutes.
According to a Chainalysis report, the attackers stole roughly ₩44.5 billion KRW, equivalent to $33–35 million, before the exchange could halt withdrawals. Assets taken included USDC, BONK, SOL, ORCA, RAY, PYTH, and JUP.
The exchange was able to freeze over half of the stolen funds, including ₩23 billion KRW worth of LAYER tokens, but the remaining amount was unrecoverable.
Analysis of the attack shows that it was not caused by a smart contract bug or a user error. Instead, the breach targeted the hot-wallet signing flow, a critical step in approving outgoing transactions.
The attackers executed hundreds of transfers in a highly automated and rapid manner, highlighting a pattern common in sophisticated CEX breaches.
Also Read: Retail Traders’ Interest in Crypto Fades, Signaling a Potential Market Bottom
Hackers Target Multi-Chain Crypto Withdrawal Systems
This particular incident reveals another trend: centralized exchanges and custodians are being impacted by breaches that are happening more frequently and are more costly.
Observers of hackers like the Lazarus Group report that hackers are interested in platforms with complicated multi-chain withdrawal systems because only one vulnerability can result in losses totaling millions of dollars.
Similar examples of previous hacks include Bybit, BTCTurk, SwissBorg, and Phemex.
The reasons are many, from social engineering and malware threats, and in many cases, from internal threats too, but in the end, the common result has always been significant losses in terms of money due to the delayed detection of the issue.
According to analysts, in this world, there are no absolute ways of being secure. The exploit demonstrates the difficulty in tracing the balances in multiple blockchains.
For example, the balances in the Solana wallets also behaved in the usual manner for quite a number of weeks until they went to zero when the attack happened.
There were 80 major transactions recorded in 15 minutes by the exchange, a drastic increase from the single $100,000 transaction recorded in the preceding week.
Real-Time Monitoring Reduces Financial Losses
Real-time tracking and automatic detection technologies can help minimize losses in such situations. The Wallet Compromise Detection Kit in Chainalysis Hexagate’s tool identifies possible wallet compromise.
Examples of this include sudden balances of zero, many large withdrawals, and transactions going to unknown addresses.
Machine-learning algorithms are trained based on past breaches to alert such systems to anomalies in behavior in the first few malicious transactions.
Moreover, there are pre-signing protection solutions, such as GateSigner, that screen transactions before they get approved. Once there are suspicious transactions, alerts are raised, or the transaction is halted before the funds are drained from the platform.
Also Read: U.S. Justice Department Seizes Crypto Scam Domain Linked to Southeast Asia
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