South Korea’s Coinrail becomes target of hackers, loses $40M

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Coinrail is the world’s 98th-ranked cryptocurrency exchange, according to data from CoinMarketCap. However, a hack of its platform on Sunday will most certainly cause it to drop a few notches, or can see its complete removal. The South Korean exchange confirmed that it was the target of a hack on Sunday that saw it lose more anywhere from $37 million to more than $40 million worth of crypto.

Following the intrusion, Coinrail took action to shut down the platform to prevent more damage, but not before losing a significant amount of NPXS, ATC and NPER tokens. There also is evidence that around $13.8 million in ATX and $6 million in DENT was stolen, as well as coins from other projects such as Jibrel Network, Kybrel Network, Storm, TRX and B2BCoin. NPXS, an ERC20 token offered by Pundi X, took the brunt of the attack, losing somewhere around $19.5 million with the theft of 2,619,542,080 NPXS tokens.

The hacker or hackers didn’t waste any time trying to move their ill-gotten funds. According to reports, the thief tried to unload some of the NPXS token, 26 million to be exact, on IDEX, a decentralized ERC20 exchange. IDEX froze the coins before they could be exchanged and Pundi X has also implemented its only “emergency security protocol” that will halt all NPSX transactions as of midday Sunday. Pundi X stated that the theft represented 3% of its total supply.

Coinrail stated that it has now moved 70% of its total reserves into an offline cold storage, while two-thirds of the other 30% have been frozen or recalled and the “remaining one-third of coins are being investigated with investigators, relevant exchanges and coin developers.”

#DENT
We now announce, that Coinrail has made an agreement with DENT Wireless for a complete recovery of DENT tokens to the accounts of all DENT holders on Coinrail.
The tokens will be in the holders' accounts when Coinrail comes back online again.

— coinrail (@Coinrail_Korea) June 11, 2018

South Korean companies operating within the cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystems created a self-regulatory group, the Korean Blockchain Industry Association, about six months ago. However, according to a representative of the group, Kim Jin-Hwa, “Coinrail is not a member of the group that promotes self regulations [sic] to enhance security. It is a minor player in the market and I can see how such small exchanges with lower standards on security level can be exposed to more risks.”