Chinese Exchange HotBit Goes Offline After Unsuccessful Attack

The Chinese exchange Hotbit went offline recently after an unsuccessful cyber attack and it shut down all services to protect the users’ funds and information so let’s read more in our latest crypto news today.

The Chinese exchange hotbit, with more than 2 million users across the world, announced that it suffered a cyberattack that forced some of the services to paralyze and to try and access the exchanges’ wallets. The notice from the platform read:

“Hotbit just suffered a serious cyber-attack starting around 08:00 PM UTC, April 29, 2021, which led to the paralyzation of a number of some basic services.”

The hackers didn’t have access to the wallets but they did have complete control over the database. As a result, the crypto exchange HotBit advised the customers to disregard all communication from entities that are claiming to be representatives of the exchange. It’s still uknown how much time the hackers had with access to the database.

In the most extreme situations, the hackers will create a loophole in the database a few days before the main attack. Once the organization recovers and what they consider to be a clean copy of their database, they will reopen the doors to them. Regarding the recovery period, the exchange expects it to take up to two weeks and outlined that it is expected to be no less than a week. Also, the estimated time of recovery will be more as things going on.

The exchange shared more information about the affected orders and products. The leveraged ETF products weren’t suitable for long-term holding and Hotbit will be fully responsible for the losses suffered by the position-holder during the maintenance period. Also, the open orders on Hotbit will be canceled once the system is restored. Furthermore, all of the daily routine income distributions will be paid out after the maintenance is completed.

The chief security officer of Hotbit Alex Zhou revealed that the users’ funds were not affected by the attack:

 “The attacker tried to break into the wallet server to steal funds but the action was identified and blocked successfully by Hotbit risk control system. All users’ funds are safe. At the same time, Hotbit is in the process of transferring all funds in hot wallet to cold wallet, the details of the whole integration could be seen on the chain.”