The exchange announced that it is temporarily suspending all deposits and withdrawals in order to perform emergency server maintenance.
The GDAC cryptocurrency exchange in South Korea suffered an attack, losing over $13.9 million in cryptocurrency. Han Seunghwan, CEO of GDAC, announced on April 10 that the exchange has stopped all deposits and withdrawals and is carrying out emergency server maintenance in response to the attack.
Notice on #GDAC Exchange Hack Alert⚠️
GDAC Exchange has officially announced that it has experienced a security breach
Please refer to the official announcements made by the Exchange👇
▶️GDAC Announcement: https://t.co/SNRFZTMEYgWEMIX Medium: https://t.co/7UIwyua72K
— WEMIX (@WemixNetwork) April 10, 2023
The announcement states that the attacker took control of a few of the exchange’s hot wallets on April 9 in the early morning and started moving cryptocurrency into those wallets at 7 am Korean Standard Time. Around 61 Bitcoin, 350.5 ETH, 10,000,000 WEMIX coins, and $220,000 worth of Tether were all taken in the incident. At the pricing of April 10, this equates to almost $13.9 million in cryptocurrency.
According to the announcement, the amount stolen is “roughly 23% of Gdac’s current total custodial assets.” The exchange has notified the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) of the loss brought on by the attack, informed the Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA) of the hack, and alerted the police.
Furthermore, GDAC is urging that cryptocurrency exchanges turn away deposits sent to the attacker’s address. Seunghwan added that the exchange is unaware of the specific time that withdrawals would resume.
According to Google Translate, he said: “We ask for your understanding that it is difficult to confirm the resumption point of deposit and withdrawal as the investigation is currently underway.”
Hacks of centralized exchanges continue to be a concern for the cryptocurrency sector. A prime example is the $15 million hack from Crypto.com in January 2022. An attacker pulled $663 million from the defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX during a liquidity issue. The GDAC attack might be the first significant centralized crypto exchange hack of 2023.