Know the details of Indodax exchange loss over US$22M in a hot wallet attack
Cryptocurrency exchange Indodax in Indonesia has announced a major security breach, as it has lost US$22 million distributed over various tokens from its hot wallets.
The attack, identified by security researchers from Slowmist and CertiK, involved the theft of substantial amounts of Ethereum (ETH), Tron’s TRX, Bitcoin (BTC), and Polygon’s MATIC, among other tokens. Despite this considerable loss, Indodax’s wallets still hold over US$400 million in various assets, indicating that the theft represents only a fraction of the platform’s total holdings.
Indodax, addressing the breach, disclosed that it’s currently in the phase of scrutinization and “maintenance” as well. Security experts on the platform shared this through a post on X, it was written, “We would like to inform you that our security team has discovered a potential security issue on our platform,” and confirmed that “your balance account was not touched both in coin crypto and Rupiah.”
However, many users who complained about losing their wallet balances, one of them was reported losing nine hundred and twenty-fifty million rupiahs from their account. It troubled them.
Amid the disruption, concerns arose when Indodax’s X account promoted an Indonesian rupiah giveaway on Instagram, raising suspicion that the account might have been compromised. The specifics of the attack are still under investigation, and details on how it was executed have yet to be disclosed.
Indodax was established in 2014, mainly concentrating on the Indonesian market. From that period onwards, the platform succeeded in dealing with over US$11 million of cryptocurrencies, the sum of all of them matched against the IDR, the Indonesian monetary unit, only in the last 24 hours, according to CoinGecko data.
The attack on Indodax comes shortly after Binance subsidiary Tokocrypto received a full license from Indonesia’s Commodity Futures Trading Regulatory Agency (Bappebti). Since 2014, Indonesian exchanges have been operating under provisional regulatory frameworks. Tokocrypto, registered as a Prospective Physical Crypto Asset Trader (CPFAK) in 2019, has become the largest crypto exchange in Indonesia by trading volume, holding a 43% market share in 2023, while Indodax follows closely with a 42% market share. Upbit Indonesia holds a 15% market share.
