North Korean hackers linked to close to $388 million Bitget hack

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen said hackers moved close to $388 million in digital assets from Bitget. Chen linked the attack to known North Korean hacker organizations based on IP behavior patterns and on-chain analysis. She said the higher figure reflected a more complete accounting of transfers during the incident. Chen had initially reported that over $350 million had moved. Security firms first flagged unauthorized transactions from Bitget's hot wallets on Thursday. Bitget then announced that it had frozen withdrawals. Bitget said the stolen assets mostly included ethereum, tron and USDT stablecoin. Bitget said no bitcoin was included among the identified stolen assets. A stolen funds tracker showed that the attacker held over $28.8 million in bitcoin. Chen said Bitget aimed to complete a full recovery as soon as possible. She said Bitget would announce the recovery time window after confirmation. CoinGecko data identified Bitget as the sixth biggest crypto exchange. The exchange processed over $1 billion in trading volume per day, according to CoinGecko data. Experts have said that artificial intelligence tools allow crypto criminals to work more efficiently. U.S. authorities have long alleged that hacking groups tied to the North Korean government steal from crypto exchanges. In July, hackers targeted a firmware bug in the Coldcard bitcoin hardware wallet. The attack stole nearly $120 million in user funds. This month, purported white-hat hackers withdrew about 4,000 bitcoins from Blockstream's Liquid sidechain federation wallet. The bitcoins were worth about $320 million at the time. The hackers later returned 85% and demanded to keep the rest as ransom.