Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Liquid on Thursday announced it fell victim to an attack that resulted in large amounts of crypto-currency assets being stolen.
Liquid announced that hackers were able to compromise its warm wallets, stealing various amounts of Ethereum, Bitcoin, Stablecoins, Ripple, and other tokens.
“We are sorry to announce that #LiquidGlobal warm wallets were compromised, we are moving assets into the cold wallet. We are currently investigating and will provide regular updates. In the meantime deposits and withdrawals will be suspended,” Liquid said in a statement.
Warm wallets are usually online and are used for easily accessing and trading funds. Cold wallets, on the other hand, are stored offline and are considered more secure.
The exchange platform says that fiat withdrawals and deposits were not impacted and that other services such as trading and Liquid Earn remain available as well. Liquid says it wasn’t yet able to identify the attack vector used.
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The crypto-currency exchange is urging users not to deposit crypto-currency assets in their Liquid wallets until the attack is fully mitigated.
London-based blockchain analytics firm Elliptic said the hackers were able to hijack more than $97 million in various crypto-currencies.
“This includes $45 million in Ethereum tokens, which are currently being converted into Ether using decentralised exchanges (DEXs) such as Uniswap and SushiSwap. This enables the hacker to avoid having these assets frozen – as is possible with many Ethereum tokens,” according to a note from Elliptic.
The attack on Liquid comes roughly one week after a hacker dubbed “Mr. White Hat” stole $600 million worth of cryptocurrency from crypto-exchange Poly Network. The platform later said the hacker was in the process of returning all of the stolen assets.
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