Yapizon the Bitcoin exchange of South Korea suffered from a massive data breach earlier this week. Hackers stole about 3816.2028 Bitcoin (about US$5 million) which is nearly 37% of total user funds.
According to official statement from exchange in Korean language, this attack took place on the Saturday, April 22, 2017, a hacker has compromised four of the total exchange’s hot wallets. A hot wallet means a Bitcoin wallet that is online and is connected to the Internet in some way.
As if this data breach was not enough to annoy the users, exchange has decided to make use of 37 percent of the user balances to accommodate the loss of 37 percent in the incident. But to compensate all this loss, the exchange is planning to issue the ‘Fei’ tokens to the “priority members.” Fei is the service product which exchange has been trading eversince 2014.
“After so many discussions, the legal and accounting consultations and reviews, has come to the conclusion that this losses incurred in this case should be equally applied to all the members. It is also a most common way to go through this liquidation process,” said in the statement.
This is the very same strategy used by the Bitfinex Exchange back in the 2016 when their hot wallets are compromised in which about $70 Million worth of Bitcoin was stolen. In return to that, Bitfinex issued the BFX tokens. However, this move is very controversial because of the difference in financial status of Bitfinex and Yapizon.
As of now, it is unclear who is behind the breach or how the wallets were accessed, however, the company has denied that any insider was involved in the event. The statement affirms that Cyber Investigation Division of Seoul Police Station and Cyber Investigation Division of Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency have been informed and are conducting an in-depth investigation.