DragonEx Market Hacked, Tether (USDT) and Ether (ETH) Stolen Among Others

Published on March 27 by Cryptovest Staff

The exchange is still investigating a hack that led to multiple transfers of assets both from user accounts and the platform’s wallets.

The exchange is still investigating a hack that led to multiple transfers of assets both from user accounts and the platform’s wallets.

DragonEx joined the list of hacked exchanges, as the market operator reported losses through its Telegram channels. The Singapore-based exchange that serves Chinese traders announced on Mach 27 that it noticed assets missing, both from user accounts and from the exchange’s wallets. The exchange’s Twitter account is also temporarily suspended, citing “unusual activity”.

An investigation is underway, and the market operator has compiled a list of addresses to which missing funds were sent. Before the hack, DragonChain carried 123 trading pairs in 82 coins and tokens, and has become one of the latest exchanges for small-scale assets to be hacked.

For some of the coins stolen, such as Ethereum (ETH), the funds were already moved away from the initial address that the hacker(s) used. This time, the theft has spread across multiple types of blockchains, and has affected EOS, Stellar (XLM), XRP, as well as leading coins - Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC) and Tether (USDT).

The rough estimation for the hack is around $800,000, a relatively small exploit. But the large variety of networks exposed to hacked funds is unique. In the recent case of Cryptopia, only one class of assets - those of the Ethereum network - were affected. This time, the hacker had prepared to steal funds as diverse as TRON (TRX), Cardano (ADA), as well as tokens such as Ontology (ONT).

DragonEx also announced that exchanges like Huobi and Gate.IO are cooperating by observing and freezing the stolen assets.

Users managed to gather a log of known transactions, seeing hundreds of thousands of USDT moved in the past days. In theory, Tether has control over the tokens and could freeze or reverse the transactions. At this point, traders are attempting to contact Tether with the issue:

https://twitter.com/dividebynine/status/1110603253639798786

This is the first significant theft of USDT, following an exploit that diverted 30 million USDT, which were later frozen.