KuCoin hacker has been identified, exchange CEO says

KuCoin’s CEO Johnny Lyu says that the exchange’s hacker has been identified and that there is substantial evidence that indicates that the suspect at hand is the same individual that stole $274.1 million from the platform on September 25.

A quick update since my last livestream on Sep 30.

After a thorough investigation, we have found the suspects of the 9.26 #KuCoin Security Incident with substantial proof at hand. Law enforcement officials and police are officially involved to take action.

— Johnny_KuCoin (@lyu_johnny) October 3, 2020

In Lyu’s October 3rd announcement, he also said that KuCoin has recovered $64 million of the stolen funds, putting the total recovered assets to $204 million since October 1st.

Despite the progress being made, KuCoin is not operating at full capacity just yet. Lyu said trading for 31 digital currencies is up and running again but that trading for BTC, ETH, and USDT is not back online yet. However, Lyu said we can expect those trading pairs to resume trading in the near future.

The KuCoin hack

On September 25th, KuCoin was hacked for roughly $275 million. According to KuCoin, the attacker gained access to KuCoin hot wallet private keys and was able to extract 14,713 BSV, 26,733 LTC, 18,495,798 XRP, 999,160 USDT, 1,008 BTC, 9,588,383 XLM, and 199,038,936 TRX, along with ETH and several ERC-20 tokens.

This adds up to an estimated $274.1 million being stolen from the exchange, which makes the KuCoin security breach the third largest digital currency exchange hack in history–following the Coincheck hack, in which an estimated $534 million was stolen, and Mt. Gox, which saw roughly $450 million stolen at the time of the hack.

Although a majority of the $275 million has allegedly been recovered by KuCoin, it is estimated that $13 million of the stolen funds were liquidated through decentralized exchanges (DeFi platforms) such as UniSwap.