From Coincheck to Bithumb: 2018's Largest Security Breaches So Far

Here's how the largest hacks of 2018 so far have happened, and what their consequences have been.

At the time of the attack, Bithumb was ranked as the sixth largest exchange by trade volumes globally but has since dropped to 10th place.

Coincidentally, the exchange started moving "All of asset[s]" to a cold wallet in order to upgrade its security system on June 16, days prior to the attack.

The hijack occurred just weeks after Bithumb was cleared by the South Korean government, which found no evidence of wrongdoing at Bithumb after a three-month investigation, but ordered the exchange to pay 30 billion won in taxes.

Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters and the Guardian all linked the cyber attack with the price drop of Bitcoin and altcoins - Bitcoin lost around 11 percent of its value at the time - albeit recognizing that Coinrail was a rather small operation, being the 99th largest crypto exchange at the time.

In January, the Tokyo-based exchange Coincheck was hacked.

There, the Coinbase team explained that NEM coins were indeed being held on a simple hot wallet rather than a much more secure multisig wallet, as the security setup differs between various coins on the exchange.

In March, a local news outlet - the Nikkei Asian Review - wrote that malware emails were sent to several members of Coincheck staff weeks before the attack, which might have opened the employee email system to allow the hackers to steal the private key.

Soon after the cyberattack, the FSA conducted on-site inspections of 15 exchanges and sent business improvement orders to seven of these exchanges, including Coincheck.

On March 7, the users of Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange by trading volume, were affected by a hack of third-party software.