India's CoinDCX confirms $44M breach: All you need to know about the hack at crypto exchange
At a time when bitcoin prices have hit a record high, a security breach at one of India's largest crypto exchange has led to fraudsters draining around $44 million, although customer assets don't seem to have been affected.
This news comes a year after a hack at another crypto exchange WazirX. The hack at WazirX in July 2024 had led to a massive $230 million loss in investor funds. Recent reports have indicated that victims of that hack are still awaiting payouts.
Over the weekend, crypto platform CoinDCX confirmed there had been a security breach and it had affected an internal operational account. "One of our internal operational accounts, used solely for liquidity provisioning on a partner exchange, was compromised due to a sophisticated server breach," the company said.
It said that the incident was swiftly contained by isolating the affected account and that no customer assets were affected. "Customers’ assets at CoinDCX are held in segregated cold wallets, protected by multi-layer custody and offline security controls," it said.
Sumit Gupta, the co-founder and CEO of CoinDCX, also assured that customer funds were "100 per cent safe." Trading and withdrawals were also running normally, he claimed.
The company informed that withdrawals below ₹5 lakh would reflect in a customer's account within five hours, while withdrawals above ₹5 lakh will be processed within 72 hours. The incident was isolated and has no impact on customers' portfolio access or operations.
What really happened?
CoinDCX says its security systems detected an incident involving unauthorised access to one of its accounts on a partner exchange, leading to a financial exposure of around $44 million. The attacker accessed the account used for operational liquidity provisioning by penetrating its liquidity infrastructure.
What CoinDCX did?
The crypto exchange says the affected infrastructure has been isolated.
CoinDCX said it has activated a full-scale response in coordination with external cybersecurity and forensics experts and global cybersecurity experts.
"The incident has been formally reported to CERT-In, and we are actively working with leading blockchain forensics firms and ecosystem partners to trace the attacker and recover assets," it said.
A recovery bounty programme will be launching soon to engage the cybersecurity community, said Gupta. The company has stressed that it maintains a "robust" reserve system to absorb such incidents and this reserve is being used to fully cover the loss.
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