Posted on July 5, 2017 at 5:24 PM

Largest Ethereum Exchange in South Korea Hacked

Ever since the cryptocurrencies became a popular and preferred method of online payment, South Korea worked on handling them. This made it a leader when it comes to exchange and use of Ethereum cryptocurrency. Experts say that over 20% of Ethereum exchanges in the world are for the won, a currency in South Korea.

All that attention has finally done what everyone was afraid of for a while – it has attracted hackers.

In a massive theft from last week, a lot of customer information was stolen, alongside alleged ‘billions‘ of won. This theft occurred in the largest Ethereum exchange in South Korea.

The largest cryptocurrency in South Korea is Bithumb, which is also the fourth largest exchange in the world. When it comes to strictly Ethereum exchanges, this is the second largest, just after China’s OKCoin.

Not many details are currently available, and even less of them in English. What is known, however, is that on Friday, Bithumb learned that they were hacked, and immediately contacted country’s cybercrime watchdog.

Upon further investigation, it is uncovered that one of Bithumb’s employees had their home computer hacked. This lead to losing info about 30,000 customers. However, the report says that no passwords were stolen. Right now, the hack is still under investigation.

Even though Bithumb has claimed that no passwords were stolen, many users from South Korea have reported the missing funds. The country even has its own version of Reddit called the Naver. On it, a subforum related to this hack has appeared, and people have started complaining about it.

According to one user, 7,100,000 won was the amount missing from their account. Roughly, this is around $6,000. When asked for comment, Bithumb remained silent.

Now, if the hack actually resulted in losing all this money, then that is the confirmation that the experts were right. For a long time, they claimed that entrusting your money to a third-party company is a bad idea. Even before this theft, another South Korean exchange was hacked.

This previous hack was much smaller, but it still resulted in millions being stolen.

As an alternative to trusting third-party companies. experts say that it would be much safer to store your money on a hard drive that doesn’t have an internet connection. Hackers can’t get to it if it is not on the web. Still, many don’t want to do this because the whole point is a convenience, which this method lacks.

As for the cryptocurrencies themselves, they continue to rise no matter what hackers do. And since stealing this online money seems to be getting easier and easier, we can only expect more hackers to start doing it.