Upbit freezes 'KRW 2.6 billion' in victim assets…"Fully covered by company assets"

South Korea's largest virtual asset exchange operator Dunamu, which runs Upbit, said on the 8th that it had frozen KRW 2.6 billion of assets damaged by hacking.

Earlier, Upbit detected abnormal withdrawal activity on a virtual asset wallet in the Solana (SOL) network family on the 27th of last month and blocked deposits and withdrawals of the related virtual assets. Afterwards, Upbit fully covered KRW 38.6 billion of withdrawn customer assets with its own assets, and also strengthened the security of its wallet system across the board.

Upbit's asset-tracking team is reported to have secured the on-chain movement paths and related addresses of the withdrawn digital assets through its self-developed 'On-chain Automatic Tracking Service (OTS)'. Upbit added those addresses to a blacklist and has requested exchanges worldwide to freeze funds if victim assets are deposited via those addresses.

A Dunamu official said, "As an initial response, we froze KRW 2.3 billion of damaged assets five hours after the withdrawal on the day of the incident, and through additional cooperation we have frozen KRW 2.6 billion to date," adding, "Follow-up procedures are underway to safely recover the frozen assets."

Upbit is also activating a reward program to increase the recovery rate of hacked assets. It targets virtual asset exchanges worldwide, white-hat hackers, security experts, and blockchain analysts. Upbit plans to pay individuals and organizations that contributed to the tracking and freezing of the victim assets 10% of the finally recovered assets as recovery contribution rewards.

Upbit said, "Customer victim assets have already been fully covered by Upbit's assets," and explained, "But we are persistently tracking and freezing to prevent assets from falling into the attackers' hands." It added, "We ask for active cooperation from virtual asset exchanges and the blockchain community worldwide to create a safe virtual asset ecosystem."