Bitget Suffers $351.6M Hack, North Korea Suspected

On September 24, 2026, Bitget, one of the world's largest crypto exchanges, suffered a massive security breach. In just a few hours, hackers stole over $351.6 million from the exchange, making it the biggest crypto theft of 2026 so far.

The attack began at 18:31 UTC when Bitget's security systems detected unauthorized transfers from its hot wallets. Within minutes, the attackers swapped nearly $20 million in USDT for about 7,111 ETH on the Arbitrum blockchain. Over the next two hours, they continued to move funds across several blockchains, including Avalanche.

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen acknowledged that the exchange's security systems were compromised through a third-party tool used daily by the exchange. The attackers forged transfer instructions and had Bitget's own signing machines approve them as legitimate. This type of attack is known as a supply chain attack because it targets vulnerabilities in an exchange's software rather than its core security.

Chen suspects that North Korea's Lazarus Group may be behind the hack, but technical evidence to prove this has not been published yet.

Bitget claims that only part of its top two wallet tiers was affected and that its cold wallets remain fully secure. However, on-chain analysts reported that the flagged transactions involved three hot wallets and one cold wallet.

The real concern is Bitget's User Protection Fund, which holds more than $464 million in Bitcoin. The fund is meant to cover losses from events like this hack, but its value rises and falls with the price of Bitcoin. If Bitcoin drops below a certain threshold, around $63,900 at the time of the breach, the fund may not cover the full loss.