South Korean crypto exchange Upbit reports $30 million theft — hack discovered hours after country’s largest search engine announced $10 billion acquisition of crypto platform's parent company

(Image credit: Alistair Berg / Getty)

Upbit, South Korea’s largest crypto exchange, has announced that it has been hacked, resulting in a loss that amounts to about $30 million. The platform discovered the attack when it detected an unauthorized transfer of Solana network assets worth approximately 44.5 billion won to an unknown external wallet, according to the company’s press release [machine translated]. Because of this, the company has suspended all deposit and withdrawal transactions, and it has moved all its assets to a safe cold wallet as a precautionary measure.

The attack was executed just hours after Naver Corp., South Korea’s biggest search engine that offers various services, including email, blogs, forums, shopping, maps, and more, announced a $10-billion all-stock deal to acquire Upbit's parent company Dunamu. The search company made this move to expand into cryptocurrencies and fintech, and aside from the acquisition, it also plans to spend $10 trillion won or more than $6.8 billion on AI and blockchain in the next half-decade, as reported by Bloomberg. Naver’s chief executive, Choi Soo-yeon, said that Naver plans to integrate AI and cryptocurrency into its services, and that it’s looking to acquire massive amounts of Nvidia GPUs to achieve this.

This reported hack is relatively small, especially as we’ve seen billions of dollars in losses due to crypto hacks just this year. For example, ByBit lost $1.5 billion in February after North Korean hackers allegedly breached its systems. This was followed by an inside job at Coinbase, which resulted in $400 million in losses. What’s unfortunate is that some crypto hacks have even resulted in bankruptcies, the most prominent example being Mt. Gox. However, an even larger $3.5-billion heist (worth $14.5 billion today) probably resulted in the shuttering of LuBian, one of the largest mining pools in the world at its peak.

We don’t expect the hack to shut the company down or cause its $10-billion deal to implode, but the timing is still quite unfortunate, as it will definitely give the market some jitters about it, potentially causing a dip in Naver’s stock prices. The silver lining in this unfortunate event, though, is that it highlighted weaknesses in Upbit’s security, allowing the acquiring company to review it for any vulnerabilities and rectify the situation before an even larger, more devastating attack is executed against it.

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Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.