South Korean police are investigating last month’s hack on the Upbit crypto exchange, after learning that the platform lost $30.2 million in under an hour on November 27.
Upbit is under fire for reporting the incident to financial regulators “over six hours after the accident took place,” the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo reported.
Media outlets in South Korea have suggested that Upbit delayed reports of the hack so as not to detract from an announcement from its operator Dunamu, which is looking to complete a merger deal with the tech titan Naver.
“Upbit officials held an emergency meeting at 5 am, 18 minutes after they first detected the hack,” Chosun Ilbo wrote, quoting a Financial Supervisory Service, or FSS, report. “Platform officials suspended deposits and withdrawals of cryptoassets on the Solana network 27 minutes later. They stopped all crypto deposits and withdrawals at 8:55 am. However, they made their first report to the FSS at 10:58 am.”
The circumstances of the events of November 27 remain unclear. But critics say that even if police and regulators discover irregularities, serious punishment remains “unlikely.”
Hackers drained $9,000 per second
The FSS submitted its report in response to a request from the lawmaker Kang Min-guk, a member of the National Assembly’s domestic policy committee.
The regulator added that in just 54 minutes, hackers were able to transfer a total of 104.0647 billion coins to “unknown external wallets.”
It added that all of these coins “belong to the Solana ecosystem,” noting that “this equates to losses of approximately 32 million coins, or $9,296, per second.”
