Indian Crypto Exchange WazirX Hit By Security Breach, $230 Million Stolen

Indian cryptocurrency exchange WazirX suffered a security breach that compromised one of its wallets resulting in theft of over $230 million in digital assets. WazirX said that it has temporarily paused rupee and crypto withdrawals on account of safety.

Hackers with ties to North Korea seem to have carried out the attack, according to British blockchain analytics firm Elliptic. The stolen funds make up more than 45% of WazirX’s $500 million holdings, which the exchange had revealed in a June report.

"We're aware that one of our multisig wallets has experienced a security breach. Our team is actively investigating the incident," WazirX said in a post on X. "To ensure the safety of your assets, Indian rupee and crypto withdrawals will be temporarily paused," the post said.

As per blockchain data monitored by Lookonchain, the theft included over $100 million in Shiba Inu tokens, $52 million in Ethereum, $11 million in Matic's MATIC, and $6 million in Pepe.

Transactional data revealed that the exploiter used the onchain exchange Uniswap to sell the stolen holding. The exploiter further owned more than $4.2 million in FLOKI tokens.

WazirX exchanged at least $2.2 million in volumes over the past 24 hours, with XRP and Tether stable coins leading the way, according to CoinGecko data.

Hours after the first confirmation, WazirX published a follow-up post identifying Liminal, a cryptocurrency custody company, as the multisig wallet's provider. Afterwards, the exchange removed the post, stating that wallets created "outside of the Liminal ecosystem had been compromised."

Multisig wallets are a particular kind of cryptocurrency wallet that needs two or more private keys in order to authenticate and confirm transactions before processing them.

The Indian Finance Ministry had declined to comment on the WazirX attack or its consequences for the country's crypto ecosystem.