According to security firm Hypernative, Mercado Bitcoin (MB) suspended deposits and withdrawals on Monday after more than $40 million left wallets linked to the Brazilian exchange.
The exchange confirmed the incident in a statement on X, claiming to have identified and quickly contained a security incident in one of its systems early in the morning. MB said customers suffered no losses and no customer data was leaked.
“Our teams are mobilized to investigate the case, track assets and coordinate measures with the competent authorities,” the company said.
Stream on 10 channels
Hypernative said the transfers were taking place across at least 10 blockchains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and Tron. The first suspicious transfer took place at 2:15 UTC. The largest transfers occurred between 6:19 a.m. and 6:53 a.m. UTC, when MB-linked wallets sent most of the funds to newly created addresses.
These transfers were ordinary signed transactions, sent as if the source wallets had authorized them. Hypernative said it was not yet clear how the attacker obtained the authority to sign these transactions. The company called its estimate preliminary because it has yet to confirm that each source address belongs to MB.
MB then published five destination addresses related to the incident, on the EVM, Bitcoin, Solana, Stellar and Tron networks. The Bitcoin address took about 106 BTC early Monday, according to data from blockchain explorer mempool.space. Most of this Bitcoin arrived in a single transfer of 104.4 BTC at 6:41 UTC. None of this Bitcoin had moved as of 2:50 p.m. UTC.
Tether froze USDT sent to two of these addresses. Its USDT contracts on Ethereum and Tron are both blacklisted, according to on-chain data. The Tron address holds 708,243 USDT and the Ethereum address holds over 3 million.
Breach follows Binance’s $6.3 billion loss
The MB breach came four days after Binance lost $6.3 billion from its hot wallets on October 29. Hypernative called the loss of Binance the largest crypto theft on record. Binance traced the theft to a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to submit unauthorized withdrawals.
Binance also halted withdrawals while overhauling the security of its withdrawal service. Around $3 billion of the stolen Binance funds were frozen on-chain with the help of blockchain partners.
The post Mercado Bitcoin Halts Withdrawals After Security Incident as Hypernative Reports $40M Outflows appeared first on CryptoPotato.
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