Iranian Platform Penta, active in the field of monitoring cryptocurrency transactions, has published its investigation into the CoinEx exchange hack. CoinEx is a foreign exchange that provides services to Iranian users despite sanctions, and it recently lost approximately $54 million in assets during the hack.
According to IDEA, Penta platform’s investigation reveals that following the news of the CoinEx hack on September 12th, the stolen assets initially included 9 addresses and 4 blockchain networks. This number has now reached 47 addresses across 25 active networks associated with the exchange. Additionally, the initial amount reported as stolen ranged between $27 to $54 million, but Penta’s investigations provide a more precise figure of $54 million.
According to Penta’s data, CoinEx exchange has identified only one suspicious address for the Bitcoin blockchain, which has received approximately 231 Bitcoins during this hack, but these Bitcoins have not been moved so far. Regarding the Ethereum blockchain, CoinEx has declared 9 suspicious addresses, while Penta has added 6 more addresses to its watchlist. Approximately 650 Ether has been transferred from these addresses, with most of them going to decentralized exchanges like Uniswap.
This report also covers other popular blockchains. These networks include Litecoin, Binance Smart Chain, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum Classic, which have one, four, one, and two addresses, respectively. The destination for these assets is primarily the Binance exchange, followed by CoinBase and KuCoin. According to Penta, due to the presence of identity verification on these platforms, it is relatively easy to recover stolen cryptocurrencies.
However, Penta’s report in the Binance Smart Chain blockchain section refers to the BRG project. This project is related to the Iranian exchange CryptoLand, where Sina Estavi, the CEO of this platform, has been sentenced to prison on charges of fraud and is currently residing outside the country. The report indicates that approximately 70 million BRG tokens have been deposited to addresses with one or two destinations, which belong to BRG community leaders. This report raises the question of the possible connection between the CoinEx hack and the BRG project.
Penta’s investigations also touch on the claims of the Lazarus North Korean hacker group. Following the CoinEx hack, a Twitter account reported Lazarus’ connection to this hack. However, according to Penta’s data, the address mentioned by this Twitter account is shared between the CoinEx theft and the Stake platform theft (from which Lazarus stole $41 million two weeks before the CoinEx hack), but there is not enough evidence to prove that Lazarus was behind the CoinEx hack.
In conclusion, this report advises CoinEx users to transfer all their assets from the platform to their personal wallets as soon as withdrawal options become available because the exchange does not hold assets.
The blockchain community also issued a statement on September 22 regarding concerns related to the freezing of assets on foreign platforms and the lack of legal recourse in case of problems. The statement recommended the use of secure personal wallets (such as hardware wallets) as the preferred method for storing digital assets and urged domestic users not to use foreign cryptocurrency exchanges. The statement also pointed out the unknown legal identity of these businesses alongside their high risks.
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