Hackers stole tens of millions of dollars from Brazilian cryptocurrency exchange Mercado Bitcoin earlier this week.
And while the company was able to contain the cyberattack, blockchain data shows hackers continued their theft for around four hours after the exchange said it had the situation contained, CoinDesk reported Thursday (Nov. 5).
The hackers drained 36,042 customer deposit addresses on Ethereum between 12:27 and 16:46 UTC (or 7:27 a.m. and 11:46 a.m. EST) on Nov. 2, despite Mercado Bitcoin saying at 12:56 UTC that it had contained the breach, the report said, citing blockchain data platform Bitquery.
The report said these findings cast doubt on how quickly Mercado Bitcoin halted the attack and suggest the attacker accessed systems used to manage customer deposits.
PYMNTS has contacted Mercado Bitcoin for comment but has not yet gotten a reply.
According to the report Bitquery traced $48.6 million in stolen assets across 10 blockchains, more than the $40 million first reported. Mercado Bitcoin pledged to cover all user losses from the hack, with partners such as Tether, Circle and Chainalysis helping freeze more than $15 million. The investigation also uncovered ties to another attack involving wallets believed to belong to the BitMart crypto exchange, CoinDesk added.
The attack on Mercado Bitcoin is part of a larger wave of recent crypto crime, highlighted by the $6 billion hack into the Binance exchange last week, now believed to be the largest financial theft in history.
Against this backdrop, PYMNTS wrote recently, Circle’s latest appeal to the Securities and Exchange Commission underlines the difficult balance regulators are being asked to strike.
In comments submitted Oct. 20 and publicized the following week, Circle urged the commission to preserve technology neutrality under its proposed Regulation Crypto Assets framework and provide more clarity on its treatment of permissionless networks.
“The request brings a longstanding debate over decentralized finance into sharper focus. How should regulators oversee financial activity when the infrastructure is designed to operate without centralized gatekeepers?” PYMNTS wrote.
“The industry is asking authorities to recognize open blockchain infrastructure as suitable for increasingly important financial functions while investigators confront the difficulty of controlling illicit funds moving through decentralized networks.”
The report also cited the PYMNTS Intelligence study “Payment Protection: Why Firms Still Aren’t Real-Time Ready,” which found in August that 57% of companies in payment-heavy industries face more fraud.
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