More than $8 million worth of cryptocurrency has been stolen from the wallets of BitKeep users in an apparent cyber attack, the latest exploit to hit a decentralised finance network.
BitKeep users reported through social media that their funds were being transferred without any activity on their end, online industry tracker Cointelegraph reported on Monday.
The amount could be higher as transfers were still being made at the time of the report, and it is also unclear whether the breach was from a single attacker or several.
The number of affected users is yet to be determined. BitKeep, which is based in Singapore, claims to have more than 6.3 million users.
Among the cryptocurrencies stolen are Binance Coin, Ether, Tether and Dai. The wallet of one suspected hacker now contains about $5 million, said BitKeep. A wallet is used by an account holder to securely store cryptocurrency.
BitKeep confirmed the breach in a Telegram post, after a “preliminary investigation”.
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“It is suspected that some APK package downloads have been hijacked by hackers and installed with code implanted by hackers,” it said, referring to Android package kit, the file format used on Google’s mobile operating system.
“If your funds are stolen, the application you download or update may be an unknown version [unofficial release version] hijacked.”
Decentralised finance, or DeFi, is based on blockchain technology. It is considered to be a safer way to conduct transactions, with the potential to replace middlemen, such as brokers and banks, in the financial system.
However, the growing scale of blockchain, cryptocurrencies and DeFi is attracting criminal activity. Cryptocurrencies tracked by Chainalysis yielded total transactions worth $15.8 trillion in 2021, up almost sevenfold from 2020.
