Bitget Suffers $352M Hack Linked to North Korean Group

Bitget Exchange has confirmed that it has contained the loss of $352M after a massive security breach. The attack, which was first reported on September 24 at 18:31 UTC, saw hackers steal nearly half of the stolen assets in XRP, worth around $157.4M.

The attackers breached Bitget's backend wallet infrastructure and fooled its authorization process, but private key compromise has been ruled out, excluding more severe risk scenarios. No further unauthorized transfers are possible.

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen said that it is 'very likely a North Korean group' behind the attack, citing IP address patterns matching those used by a certain DPRK group. This link to Lazarus Group, which carried out last year's Bybit $1.5B breach, has raised concerns about centralized exchanges being increasingly targeted by attackers.

Although the incident is the second-largest centralized exchange breach in history, Bitget claims it has sufficient user protection funds to cover the recent loss, surpassing $464M. The exchange has not set a date for restoring withdrawals but is preparing for withdrawal restoration in parallel.